


Perfect Little Freaks: Act 5

by AOrange



Series: Perfect Little Freaks [3]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - No Sburb Session, Comedy, F/F, F/M, Family, Family Drama, Gen, M/M, Pesterlog, Relationship(s)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-11
Updated: 2015-07-17
Packaged: 2018-03-30 01:37:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 53,793
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3918352
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AOrange/pseuds/AOrange
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The kids are raised and the nest is empty. Dave and Rose are both in college, Dirk still doesn't have a normal guy job, and Roxy's only getting better with age like the wine habit she's trying to kick. </p><p>There's one less Lalonde in town though, as Dave starts his first semester under the Strider name. </p><p>Just because they're all split up doesn't mean there's any less drama. Somehow, there's even more. Families have a way of doing that.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. [I13]: the passport is the thing i dont have

**July, 2014**

A lifetime of living in New York City had trained Karkat to sleep through almost anything. He knew how to tune out what he didn't want to hear and convert even car crashes and gunshots into background noise. He could ignore people telling him to shove it, never even caught on to threats on his life if he didn't hurry the fuck up getting off the subway, and had no idea when someone was actively trying to get his attention. 

Besides, if it took them more than three calls of his name, they were probably too dumb to realise he'd switched to actively ignoring them. 

It had taken years of retraining to wake up to the sounds of his phone. Sure, alarms were easy enough, especially when he shoved the device under his pillow so the incessant beeping would be right by his ear, but he still struggled with any of the other alerts. 

When he woke up to the temperature in his room already well above seventy degrees, he let out an irritated snarl as he struggled to disentangle himself from his sheets. 

His phone was chiming, but it wasn't an alarm. He could only wonder what had come through his queue overnight. 

He snatched up the device from where it had fallen to the floor, and trudged sleepily down the hall to the bathroom. 

Ten minutes into catching up on alerts that had come through while he was sleeping, he was interrupted by a sharp rapping on the bathroom door. He just huffed and turned up Spotify on his phone, flushed, then got into the shower with the intention of using up all the hot water. 

That was usually enough to ruin his brothers' day. It wasn't the worst he could do with what he had but it was enough to get a reaction, and if he was lucky, Kankri would try to ignore him when he got home later that afternoon. 

It was a fight in itself to get out the front door without a confrontation but he made it with the aid of the headphones he usually kept plugged into his computer. A quick flip of his middle finger over his shoulder and a door slam and he was home free. 

Sollux hadn't specified exactly which Barnes and Noble to meet him at, but he hadn't sounded like he was actively trying to avoid anyone so it was most likely the one within walking distance. He sent a quick text saying that he was on his way and was it that store or the one across town because he wasn't about to fucking reroute his walk to run into a subway station. The reply came quickly, in Sollux's usual irritating shorthand that meant the question was obviously a waste of his time; kk, y.

The worst part was, it still took Karkat an infuriating three steps to figure out if the text meant 'okay, yeah', or 'Karkat, why?'

He didn't even bother saying hello when he walked past Sollux, who was already sitting down in the cafe. He just grunted, threw his phone down on the table, and kept walking to go and buy a drink. That quickly became a huge thing when he had to repeat the order twice even though there was nothing convoluted about it - caramel macchiato, double the caramel, and an iced triple shot Americano, then he had to point out that it was double caramel, not half, and both drinks were the wrong size. 

"Your phone rang twice and you got four messages," Sollux said without looking up from his laptop. 

"You better not be using the fucking wifi for any of your shit," Karkat snapped, dropping into one of the other chairs as he slid the macchiato across the table. "Because if you are, I'm out."

"Tuna's grounded."

"He's fucking twenty."

"And grounded." 

"Who's enforcing that?"

"No one has to," Sollux went on, reaching around in the general vicinity of his coffee for a few seconds; Karkat eventually just pushed it into his hand. "You tell him he's grounded and he hesitates every time he leaves his room let alone the house."

"Idiot."

"What are you even doing?"

"Tumblr."

"And running in the background is?"

"Game of Thrones download."

"Lying motherfucker," Karkat said. "The fuck?"

"Huh?" Sollux finally looked up, but it was almost entirely because he couldn't find the edge of the table to put his coffee down again. 

"Lalonde called me? Twice?"

"Why?"

"How the fuck should I know why?"

"Didn't you call him back?"

"You're not listening, are you?"

"Yeah."

"I'll be back," Karkat said, nudging the screen of Sollux's laptop down to get his attention. "Me, outside, phone. You, here, coffee."

"Yeah, yeah," Sollux said, pushing the screen back into place. 

Whatever he was actually doing, Karkat was sure it was something illegal. He wasn't trying to get into some new servers, because he didn't have his hacking face on. It was definitely something more illegal than downloading a TV show; small time downloads were about the only thing overlooked when it came to Sollux Captor's monitoring reports. He'd tried explaining it before, something about how his downloading habits helped lead the Feds to the original uploaders. 

The point was, that if Sollux was trying to hide something from his online Government babysitters, it had to be something good. 

"The fuck are you calling me for?" Karkat asked when the line connected and Dave answered, only half a ring later. 

"Why didn't you answer?"

"Because I was busy?"

"Bullshit, you're never busy."

"Point still stands, Lalonde, why did you call me?"

"Oh, this'll be fun, I thought to myself. It's going to be hilarious. Fucking amazing. Decades from now children will talk in hushed tones in school playground about this shit," Dave went on; he was hard to hear, but Karkat put that down to the traffic barrelling down Broadway. "And then, they'll talk about how utterly fucking _wrecked _I got when the door opened and instead of being all motherfucking surprise bitch, I got fucking Kankri'd!'__

__Karkat snorted, then stopped suddenly when he realised what Dave had said._ _

__"You're here?"_ _

__"Yeah, you fucknut. I thought it'd be hilarious. But no, you fucking _destroyed_ me without even trying. I got up this morning, thought that this would be great, got in the shitbox and started driving, right. Like I know the way because it's pretty much drive down the only road until you hit Jersey, and when you do try not to make eye contact. Then, _then_ I had to park the shitbox in Union City and get a bus into Manhattan just to even get to the subway. You know what else you have to do after that? You have to remember which fucking train goes to your place because there's like eighty-seven that leave Penn Station so you ask a dude sitting behind a bulletproof window and he laughs because it's the fuckin' A train that is literally a straight line from here fuck off kid."_ _

__"Yeah, definitely the A from there, I could have told you that. I'm pretty sure I _have_ told you that." _ _

__"Shut the fuck up and let me finish. Then when I get the train up to your place, I'm thinking man this is going to be hilariously worth it, and your fucking brother opens the door!"_ _

__"Now are you done with your shitfit? Like, go on if you want, this is a hilarious position for me to be in right now," Karkat said, glancing down the block. "You want some more directions?"_ _

__"Yes I want some more fucking directions, Vantas!"_ _

__"Are you facing the park?"_ _

__"It's all I can see for fuckin' miles."_ _

__"Now do a one-eighty."_ _

__"Then?"_ _

__"Then walk three blocks until you hit Broadway, turn left, and keep walking until you hit Barnes and Noble."_ _

__"How far do I have to walk?"_ _

__"It's like four full blocks all up, stop whining."_ _

__"I can whine if I want, you're not where you were supposed to be."_ _

__"I never said I'd be home, assmunch. Text me when you're on Broadway," Karkat said, hanging up before Dave could finish his quip about being a star._ _

__He went back inside because he knew it'd take Dave a while to get there if he was going to sulk the entire way. It was probably a ten minute walk, at most, but there were a lot of factors to take into consideration. Dave had never lived in a town let alone a city, so he was bound to walk far too slowly. He was in a bad mood. He was probably checking out Google maps at the same time which would slow him down even more. Then, inevitably, he'd see a fucking leaf or cloud or stray cat and stop to take a photo._ _

__"Dave's going to be here in fifteen minutes. What the fuck are you doing?"_ _

__"Huh?"_ _

__Karkat sighed, dramatically, then repeated himself._ _

__"I told you, torrenting."_ _

__"And I called bullshit. We're on fucking public security cameras, if you pull shit I go down as a fucking accomplice or something."_ _

__"That's not how it works," Sollux said, finally looking up. "The government give no shits who I have coffee with. How many times do I have to explain this?"_ _

__"I don't want to get wrapped up in your shit. The only reason you're not in fucking Guantanamo is because you're white," Karkat pointed out, checking his phone for messages._ _

__"Look, are you sitting there writing a code that'll get you into the DoC?"_ _

__"Why the fuck would I want into prison records?"_ _

__"To see if you can. I can. I did. But that's not what I'm doing now, KK. Calm the fuck down."_ _

__"Then what are you doing?"_ _

__"Homework."_ _

__"It's Summer," Karkat said. He checked his phone again, actually finding a message there; ' _hit broadway turned left see barnes and noble_ '. "Who're you doing homework for?"_ _

__"The FBI. Now I'm at the bottom of the list of things I can tell you without you ending up in Guantanamo," Sollux said, reaching for his coffee again. "Did you say something before?"_ _

__"Yeah, Dave's here."_ _

__"Where?"_ _

__"Probably half a block away."_ _

__"Why?"_ _

__"I have no fucking idea," Karkat said, getting up again to go meet Dave out front. "Are you really doing shit for the FBI right now?"_ _

__"Yeah. Yeah, I am. They're trying to keep me out, I'm trying to get in. The torrenting throws them off."_ _

__"Huh, neat."_ _

__With Karkat's useless thinking out loud done, Sollux went back to the problem on his laptop. He knew what he was trying to do and that was simple enough. If he'd been at home with even his own vaguely protected network, he would have been done half an hour ago. He wasn't allowed to go near anything in the vicinity of encrypted anymore so that was out, but a public, unsecured network was a problem. He ran a few more diagnostics, logged in and out of the Barnes and Noble security feed a few times, and went to check the progress of the background torrents._ _

__He had to make a move, soon, but he hadn't figured out the best loophole yet. There was one. A simple solution always existed, and he always found it._ _

__Fuck loopholes, he thought, opening up a new window. He just had to get in and out before they stopped him. It wasn't so much about not getting busted, it was about not getting booted out before he was ready._ _

__Get it, save file, get out, sever connection._ _

__He slammed the laptop closed, pocketed the USB, then flipped the machine over to start pulling it apart to get at the hard drive._ _

__"Is he okay?"_ _

__"Apparently this shit is what working for the FBI looks like."_ _

__"What?"_ _

__"Look, it's a long fucking story that I don't want to go over again."_ _

__Sollux paused when he realised that Karkat was speaking. He didn't know how long he'd been zoned out, but it was long enough that Dave was halfway through what looked like a second mocha frappuccino._ _

__"Hey," Dave said. "You want to come too?"_ _

__"What?"_ _

__"Dude we've been talking this whole time were you really not listening?"_ _

__"I didn't even know you were talking," Sollux said._ _

__"Fuckin' rude. What're you doing?"_ _

__"Now? I need to destroy this."_ _

__"How?"_ _

__"Shooting them usually works," he replied, already starting to undo screws._ _

__"I know a guy."_ _

__"Really?"_ _

__"Yeah, my totally not step-dad."_ _

__"Can he get here?"_ _

__"He lives in San Diego."_ _

__"Too far. I don't have that much time on my hands. Try again."_ _

__Dave glanced over at Karkat, who only gave him an 'I told you so' look in return. They'd been talking for at least forty minutes around Sollux's increasingly fast-paced mutterings._ _

__"We're going on a road trip. Do you want to come?" Dave tried again._ _

__"I don't have time."_ _

__"It's Summer and you're telling me you don't have time to go on a road trip to Canada to buy some beer?" Dave hoped that throwing in the premise of the trip would be enough to catch Sollux's attention long enough for him to give a proper response._ _

__"Canada?"_ _

__"Yeah, I need Karkat to buy the beer because it was his birthday last month and I'm not eighteen until December."_ _

__"I'm not allowed to leave the country," Sollux said, finally looking up from the laptop._ _

__"Is he fucking with me?" Dave asked._ _

__"Why would I joke about that?"_ _

__"Dude, you're effectively grounded by Obama."_ _

__"Hilarious. Look, can you help me destroy this or not?"_ _

__Dave shrugged, looking over at Karkat again for help._ _

__The noise of their conversation faded into the background again as Sollux drained the last few mouthfuls of his disappointingly room-temperature coffee. He didn't actually have to destroy the hard drive but it would make things a lot more entertaining; it wasn't even his laptop, regardless of what Karkat thought. Well, it was, but it was one from his pile of old ones that had been replaced for one reason or another over the last few years._ _

__He turned the drive over in his hand, thinking._ _

__Before he knew it, he was out the door of Barnes and Noble, standing on the curb with the hard drive in his hand and his wrist trapped by Karkat's fist._ _

__"Now you've lost it, you fucking madman," Karkat said, using his other hand to snatch the drive before Sollux could throw it into oncoming traffic. "Is going to the bookstore really too much fucking excitement for one day now?"_ _

__"You'll probably die if you go," Sollux said, changing the subject as he wrestled his arm free. "To Canada."_ _

__"I think I'm more likely to die if I stay here."_ _

__"Let's see, KK. Bears. Beer. Teenagers driving vehicles way too fast. Deer. You'll be dead before dark."_ _

__"Yeah, yeah, doom and gloom, I get it," Karkat rolled his eyes, ushering Sollux back into the building. "You sure you don't want to come?"_ _

__"I wasn't making up the Obama-imposed grounding. For some reason, Canada still counts as an international border."_ _

____

+++

"Do you need to piss?"

"What?"

"Do you need to piss?"

"Is my bladder capacity really any of your fucking business?"

Dave stared at Karkat, sitting in the passengers' seat of the shitbox, for longer than was probably necessary. He fumbled to put the keys in the ignition without breaking eye contact, but that wasn't working out in his favour so he turned to look at what he was doing. 

"Just checking, dude. I don't know how much you know about anything further north than Yonkers but it's two and a half hours from Albany to Plattsburgh and there's gonna be jack all places to stop between here and there without it being a gas station that hasn't closed since about 1973," Dave explained, backing the car out of the Wendy's parking lot. "Well, I mean there's like eighty-three McDonalds and shit but they're all in towns and the further you go the more isolated and weird as fuck they get."

"Just drive."

"You sure?" 

"Yes, Dave. I'm fucking sure. What am I, six?"

"I told you, I'm just checking. I don't want to stop again before it gets dark," Dave said as he pulled out into traffic. "There's about two hours of daylight left and I'm not about to waste that not driving." 

"Look, I'll tell you when I need to piss. Just drive."

When Dave slammed on the brakes less than ten minutes later, Karkat almost wished he'd taken up the offer. 

"Was that a fucking deer?!" 

"Uh," Dave thought aloud, staring into the bushes on the side of the road as they passed. "Dude, I don't know how to break it to you but there aren't deer the size of cats out here."

"Then what the fuck was that?"

"A cat. You just screamed because of a cat." 

"No, I screamed because you dropped from sixty to about three almost instantly!"

"Good thing I had new brake pads put on the shitbox in April," Dave laughed to himself. "Fuckin' cat. You gonna scream like a bitch when Mutie comes at you because you're a new thing to scratch up? Because he'll do that. Like you'll be sitting there with this blind cat and suddenly you'll cough or something and he'll think it's the end of the world and dig in with his claws so he doesn't fall the whole two feet to the floor."

"Sounds like an asshole, like every other fucking cat."

"Nah, I like him. Better than Jaspers ever was. It's probably because me and Mom basically took turns holding him for the first six months of his life. Jaspers was already old when I came along and I'm pretty sure he held a grudge against me until the day he died, you know, for monopolising his favourite human's time," Dave said. "Look, because I almost made you piss yourself in fear I'm gonna level with you," he went on. 

Karkat raised an eyebrow and kept it there until Dave turned away from the road and saw the gesture. 

"One, I didn't almost piss myself, I almost went through the windshield because some run down country DMV decided you were old enough to murder people with two tonnes of steel. Two, if you're planning on taking me out behind the woodshed to shoot me, let me text my brother one last fuck you first," Karkat said.

When Dave suddenly took a hand off the steering wheel, Karkat was fully prepared to believe his own bullshit. 

"Look, I've been fucking with you on the whole cassette thing," Dave admitted, holding up a USB cable. 

It was hard to tell because he had to keep turning back to the road, but Dave was fairly certain that Karkat was giving him the filthiest look he could muster. 

For the last two hours, they'd been listening to cassettes that Dave had found in a box in the back of Dirk's office cupboard. They'd obviously been there for a while and he'd asked his uncle if he could borrow a stack a few months back, because the hell if he wasn't going to try and build up some hipster cred before he moved to the city. 

That's what he told Dirk, anyway. He'd really been trying to scrounge up old turntables to see if there were any worth salvaging to take with him to college. The cassettes were a pretty good alternative. 

At the end of the day, it was at least another two hours to Plattsburgh and he could only listen to _Licenced to Ill_ so many times. 

"You what," Karkat deadpanned. "We've been listening to the fucking Beastie Boys for two hours because you thought it'd be funny?"

"Yeah. I mean, it's good the first few times but I can see how back to back playings would start to drive you nuts," Dave said. He threw the cable across at Karkat. "Like, plug in your phone, I don't care, just don't go denying that the last three rounds of _Fight for Your Right_ were probably the greatest sing-a-longs you'll ever have." 

"They weren't." 

"Dude, seriously? Okay, but hear me out. It's July, it's like seventy degrees, and we're driving down some upstate highway with the windows down. We've got snacks, we've got most of a six pack of Red Bull left, and we've got the Beastie Boys. Yeah, it's on cassette, but this roving shitbox is as old as I am so what do you expect? It's gonna be a long night because even though I could take this highway at like eighty you're a pussy who won't let me go more than seventy without flipping your shit. That's some fucking Jack Kerouac shit right there, bro."

"Jack Kerouac didn't have Red Bull or the Beastie Boys."

"Dude, you're missing the point. We both fucking suck and road trips are almost cool. By extension, we're almost fucking cool," Dave said, turning away from the road to glance over into the passengers' seat. "Huh?"

"Look, I'm going to agree with you on the condition that you just drop this bullshit because this has been one hell of an embarrassing conversation," Karkat said, scrolling through Spotify. 

"Nah, we've had worse."

"Name one. Actually, don't name one. I can think of at least three," he said. He rolled his eyes, then hit play on the selected track. 

Dave let out a burst of ugly laughter and almost drove into the safety barrier when _Sabotage_ exploded from the car speakers.

+++

"Where's your what now?" 

"My passport. Aren't we like two miles from the border?"

"Yeah?"

"So where's my passp - what the fuck!"

Over the last six hours or so, Karkat had managed to convince himself that Dave did know how to drive at least well enough that they wouldn't die. That conversation had filled at least half the time in itself, because Dave had so many stories about near misses that always seemed to be the fault of another driver. 

He drove to school and back in nearly any weather. When it got so bad that even chains on his tires were useless against the fallen snow and frozen potholes, he just stayed home. It took surprisingly little snowfall for that to happen, because even though the main roads were plowed, Dave explained, they didn't exactly have a driveway he could just shovel clear. 

When the roads were wet he just slowed down, and during the summer all bets were off. He'd only seen about three traffic cops in his life, all of them in Potsdam, something Karkat couldn't even imagine. 

So when Dave looked over his shoulder, checked his mirrors, then suddenly threw the car into a u-turn in front of a minivan that seemed far too close, Karkat had no choice left but to scream in some combination of fear and confusion. 

"Dude relax, there was plenty of time," Dave said, waiting for the traffic to clear in the other direction so he could turn right onto another road. "So, funny story."

"Bullshit."

"No, it really is. So when you said that I was like haha oh yeah, he needs one of those to get over the border. Then I was thinking about how I think you put it in the glove compartment so you deliberately wouldn't lose it then you did anyway, and I thought about how close we got to the border just now and how fucking sweet I'd be to get an iced cap from that Tim Horton's down the road."

"Get to the fucking point, Lalonde," Karkat snapped. 

"The point is I totally forgot you need passports to go to Canada."

"You didn't bring your passport."

"Well, it's hard to bring something you don't have," Dave said, looking over with what he hoped was a sheepish grin. "I don't have a passport," he added. "The passport is the thing I don't have."

"Then what the fuck was all this bullshit about? Why the fuck did you drag me to literally the edge of the fucking country when you knew we wouldn't make it over the fucking line?"

"Dude, relax. Hands inside the vehicle at all times, blah blah blah. Look, I woke up and thought it'd be great fun because you're eighteen and you can buy whatever the hell you want and it'll be cool to just buy some Canadian beer, but I'm still seventeen and I guessed it'd be okay if I'm with someone who's eighteen to just cross with my license. But I forgot that when they changed that rule, Mom got really excited because it meant I couldn't just go to Canada whenever I wanted, but look, long story short, you wanna come hang at my place?"

Dave was certain that Karkat was fully prepared to jump out of the moving car, GTA-style.

"How much further?" 

"Two hours, but I can do it in one and a half."

"Bullshit."

"I'll bet you ten bucks. We should stop in town, I can do about an hour fifteen to town."

"Five."

"Ten."

"Six," Karkat offered. 

When Dave pulled into the parking lot of the Potsdam Price Chopper an hour and twelve minutes later, Karkat bitterly handed over seven fifty and refused to go any higher. 

They stocked up on pizza rolls, fritos, and soda, which Dave charged to Roxy's 'definitely only to be used in emergency situations' credit card, because a house with less than three bags of pizza rolls was a fucking tragedy waiting to happen. They paid and were back in the car less than ten minutes after they'd stopped; Karkat could tell that being so close to home was the only thing keeping Dave alert anymore. 

It was a surprise when he stopped again, another fifteen minutes down the road, outside what looked like a run down general store. 

"Be cool," Dave said, sliding out of the drivers' seat again. As they walked towards the store, Karkat realised that for the second time that night, Dave hadn't bothered locking the car when no one was in it. 

"What the hell is this?"

"I said be cool, bro," Dave repeated, holding the door open long enough for Karkat to follow him inside. "Hey," he said, nodding to the guy behind the counter. 

"Sup?"

"Jack all. You the only one working tonight?"

"Yeah. Ladies choice, Lalonde," the guy snorted. "And I don't mean your mom."

"Don't start this shit, Phil. Don't even fucking start, that shit's gross," Dave said, cracking a grin. 

Karkat still had no idea what was going on, but he wasn't about to speak up. While Dave had always been taught that city dwellers were wild and desensitised to living around so many other people, Karkat had grown up hearing the exact opposite. He had enough sense to keep his mouth shut, at least for a little longer, until he could be sure that the store was just a store, and not a front for a mass-murdering operation. 

"Look, I'm not gonna lie. Your mom's still hot and she's keeping me in a job. Hurry up and make a decision before I get a real customer and have to kick you out," Phil said, glancing back at the front door to make sure no one had followed the boys in. 

"I dunno, do you give a shit?"

"Huh?"

"Do you give a shit or is beer just beer?"

"Wait, what?"

"I'm taking that as you officially giving up your say in this conversation. Twelve pack of PBR, I guess," Dave said. He handed over ten dollars, collected his change, then went to pick up the beer from the fridge. He had to kick the back of Karkat's knee to get him walking out the door, and waved over his shoulder as they left the store. 

"Dave," Karkat said, but not until a few minutes later when they were, once again, driving down an empty road. "What the shit was that?"

"That was Phil. He graduated from my school a few years back." 

"He sold you beer."

"Yeah he did," Dave laughed. 

"Why the fuck did you try to drag me over the border to buy beer when you've got a fake ID?"

"Dude, did you see me use a fake ID? No, because that's dumb as shit around here. Everyone knows I'm seventeen. What good is a fake ID when everyone in town has known you your entire life?"

"You know what I mean, Lalonde, don't play me." 

"Chill. You want a beer?"

+++

"I feel like I'm stuck between a rock and a hard place," Rose said, speaking quickly after Dirk picked up the Skype call she had started. "On one hand, my fondness for my brother is true and is something that I take pride in, because so few people can count their siblings as friends. With such a relationship comes responsibility. I feel the need, as his elder sister, to look after him but at the same time, the nature of our friendship wants me to forget all of that," she explained.

"Hello to you too, Rosie. So what's brought all this on after midnight? Because this is some deep philosophical shit we're in."

"Let me finish, then you can assess just how deep in this philosophical shit we really are entrenched," she quipped back. "As I was saying, I feel torn between playing the sister and the friend, because each has the potential for hours of entertainment."

"That's pretty much how I've always felt about your mom," Dirk said, nodding.

"Oh, please don't remind me."

"Then as your predominant male role model, how about a reminder to get on with the deeply twisted explanation of the relationship between you and your brother figure."

"Well, it sounds deeply twisted when you put it like that, doesn't it?" 

"Get on with it, Rose."

"Dave brought a boy home."

"He what?"

"Oh, relax. Well, I think we should be relaxing because it's only Karkat, but by the same token we should also be discussing that he drove to New York City today just to pick up Karkat and drive all the way back."

"I did the same thing once, I was probably about his age. Any later and I would have been in Texas already," Dirk mused out loud. "Man, long distance was hard back in the day."

"Lovely, but beyond the point. I'm fairly certain there nothing more than normal levels of teenage boy shenanigans going on downstairs, but this certainly is a quandary to be in," Rose said. 

It was a fairly good assessment, she thought, considering that all she'd been able to hear for the last half hour was Call of Duty. Occasionally, one of them would shout at the other through a mouthful of pizza roll or beer, but for the most part only noises from the TV were making it upstairs. 

Even with her bedroom door open, neither of them would hear her talking to Dirk. 

"So how are you gonna fuck with them?"

"Excuse me?"

"Stop fucking me around and tell me how you're going to screw with them," Dirk said. Rose watched him disappear from the kitchen table, evidently giving her a few moments to think up a response before he returned with a beer of his own. "I'm guessing you've already thrown at least one disapproving look at Dave."

She tried to look indignant, but when all was said and done, she was as much like her uncle as Dave was to their mother. He could probably predict what she was going to do with almost terrifying accuracy.

"I made a few vague comments when they arrived. There hasn't been much opportunity yet, apart from the rather obvious play of accusing Dave of getting him drunk on cheap beer."

"Dammit, Phil," Dirk said. "I told him last time I was there, he's only allowed to sell Dave those shitty pre-mixed things until he's eighteen."

"You can tear through the youth who works nights at the local liquor store next time you visit," Rose said. "Effectively, my goal is to figure out if there really is anything going on there or not because I just can't look away. All of Dave's friendships are bizarre, but this one is the most perplexing."

"You think he would have said something if there was anything going on?"

"Are we talking about the same Dave? Of course he wouldn't. There's a chance that would lead to conversations that were far too personal."

"Or," Dirk said, pausing for long enough to drink a few mouthfuls of his beer. "Look, let me play Devil's Advocate for the both of us right now and ask what you think would happen if we just quit busting his ass over shit like this? No one heckled you about your fondness for all things womanly and you just mentioned it over breakfast one day. Like, yeah, we already figured it out but we didn't give you shit about it."

"I am not my brother though. I don't think he'd say anything if no one asked the right questions and even then he'd change the subject in six different ways before he started on a seventh topic," Rose said. She leaned down, out of view, and sat back up with Mutie against her chest. "If your advice is to stop giving him shit, are you saying it as my uncle or his father?"

"As your uncle, I say go nuts, but nuts with boundaries. As his father, don't piss him off, you know he likes keeping to himself."

"Fine," she agreed. "Would you like me to keep you updated?"

"Fuck, yes. Now, I know I'm gonna sound fuckin' ancient for this but it's probably time for bed in California."

"I can still see daylight out the window behind you."

"Bullshit. I'll give you twilight."

"Dusk."

"Fine. Sleep well, uncle mine."

"Look, I was serious about the boundaries. Limit your shit-giving."

"I will," Rose agreed. She waved with her free hand and moved to end the call, but Dirk disconnected before she could. She swivelled her chair around and stood up, still carrying Mutie, and started out of her room towards the stairs.

It was a strange experience, watching her brother talk with a friend in person. Through school, he'd kept acquaintances rather than friends. He'd only held onto people who served a purpose to him; enough of a relationship to get his shit done, but not enough that he had to spend time with them when the day was done. He had lab partners to work with, an entire team of track runners to force him to get better, and just enough connections to be invited to the occasional party. 

But now, he was sitting on the couch with a friend, laughing, playing video games, and drinking beer with no obvious ulterior motive. When one of them had the controller, the other was eating pizza rolls by the handful. They gave each other shit when one grenaded himself and had to hand over the game. 

Rose smiled, not that either of the boys saw. 

"How about a trade?" 

"What for what?" Dave asked. He looked up to see his sister standing behind the couch and ended up getting brutally murdered in the here seconds he'd looked away from the TV. He leant over and handed the controller to Karkat. 

"Mutie for a beer," Rose offered. 

"Deal," Dave said, making grabby motions above his head, ready to take the cat off her hands. The angle was all wrong though, so she reached over and let Mutie jump when he was almost on the cushion beside her brother. "Beers are in the fridge. They're probably still not cold but you can just put some ice in 'em."

"You're always so classy," she said, giving Mutie one last pat as he crawled up onto Dave's lap. 

"All class all the time," Dave said. "It's in the fucking Lalonde Family Handbook."

"We have one of those?"

"Yeah, it says that when one family member trades the family cat for a beer, the one who initiated the trade should always fucking say thank you, you massive bitch."

"Thank you, Dave." 

"Wow, that sounded sin-fucking-scere."

"Do I need to call our mother and tell her you're being a child?"

"You're the child if you're gonna call mom and tattle on me," Dave said, hugging Mutie close as he reached to pick up his own beer from the edge of the coffee table. "Maybe I'll call Bro."

"It's after Californian bedtime."

Dave sighed. 

"You got your beer, right?"

"Yes, and I passed on the ice."

"Okay cool, you can fuck off now."

"Why?"

"Rose please."

"Dave, please." 

"What the fuck is wrong with that fucking cat?"

Karkat's sudden interruption stopped their pseudo-argument in its tracks. 

"Dude, not cool," Dave said, covering Mutie's ears. "He's got problems. Well, he's totally fucked up but that's why we like him. Like there must have been something really wrong with the whole cat breeding shit because he's half blind in one eye, that's the good one, and the vet thinks that his other eye was blind anyway and got fucked up when his mom thought he was a goner. Like, 'oh man this one won't live, better put it out of it's misery', something like that. Spoiler alert, he lived. But yeah, it means he walks into walls and it takes him like twenty minutes to get upstairs by himself and if he gets into the basement he's pretty fucked until me or mom get home."

"That's one fucked up cat," Karkat agreed, unpausing the game when Dave finished his monologue. 

"So are you, asshole."

"What?"

"I don't know, there's some joke about how you've got 'kat' in your name but I can't think of it because I'm busy protecting the ears of the fuckin' innocent over here."

"I know we welcomed you when you first arrived, Karkat," Rose said. Instead of disappearing like Dave had asked her to, she had decided to sit down in the armchair alone with her phone and the newly acquired beer. "But I don't think anyone explained what you've really got yourself into here. This house is something like a magnet for the unusual and it always has been. The cat is honestly the least of your worries. Well, I suppose the coyotes won't be a problem as long as you're indoors and uninjured." 

"Rose."

"That said, if you do go out, spend some time by the river. That's always a good day during summer. As long as you can see the house you'll be fine."

"Rose."

"Yes?"

"Do you want anything?"

"I'm offended by you not wanting to spend time with me. I'm only home from college for a few more weeks, and then you're moving as well. Surely you'd like to spend just a little time with me. Now, pass the pizza rolls." 

"Rose!"

"What were you planning on doing this week, anyway? I assume Karkat is here for a reason." 

"Yeah, we were driving up to see his girlfriend."

"What?!" 

Dave rolled his eyes and ignored Karkat's exclamation in favour of keeping his undivided attention on his sister, at least for the time being.

"Who would be?"

"Terezi. She's over in Toronto."

"Were you really trying to get me to Toronto? Dave, you fucking asshole, I didn't agree to that. I did not agree to another five hours from here in a car with you and the fucking Beastie Boys! No one signed me up for this shit! I should have listened to Sollux and his fucking vision of doom, because if I have to spend another five hours in a car with you and the Beastie Boys I will just end it right here and now, Dave. Don't fucking think I won't," Karkat went on, ranting even while both Dave and Rose just looked on with some kind of morbid fascination. 

"Are you done?"

"Yes, I'm fucking done!"

"Okay cool, so I can go back to telling Rose my side of the story?" Dave asked.

"Your side is wrong."

"Thanks, bro. But anyway," he said, turning back to Rose once again. "What about you? Are you done with your shit for tonight?"

"I don't know what you're talking about," Rose said innocently. She stood up from her place in the armchair and swapped out her empty beer for Dave's still half-full can as she passed. "Try to keep it down, won't you?"

"Good night, Rose."

Dave was sure he heard her let out a quiet laugh on her way back upstairs. 

\-- tentacleTherapist [TT] began pestering gardenGnostic [GG] at 01:17 --

TT: Jade?

gardenGnostic [GG] is now an idle chum!

TT: I suppose that answers the question as to whether you are anywhere near civilization this week.

\-- tentacleTherapist [TT] ceased pestering gardenGnostic [GG] at 01:18 --   
\-- tentacleTherapist [TT] began pestering ghostyTrickster [GT] at 01:18 --

TT: Hello, John.  
GT: hi, rose!  
GT: it's been forever since we talked!  
GT: what's up?  
TT: While that was a lovely greeting, John, it does make me feel a little put out seeing as the only reason for this conversation to be happening right now is that I need to ask you something.  
GT: huh? that's okay! it's always good to talk to you. what's your question?  
TT: I've been told something which I'm not entirely certain I believe. Does Karkat really have a girlfriend?  
GT: karkat has a girlfriend????  
TT: Well, Dave mentioned that he and Karkat were driving to go and visit his girlfriend.  
GT: dave has a girlfriend?????  
TT: No, Karkat does.  
GT: i'm confused.  
TT: I'm sorry.  
GT: wait.  
GT: dave AND karkat were driving?  
TT: Yes. Karkat is sitting on the couch in my mother's living room, as is Dave. They're playing Call of Duty and have been for quite a while.  
GT: those dumb butts!  
TT: John?  
GT: sorry rose, i swapped to pesterchum on my phone so i could go downstairs. dave really is online!  
TT: He sure is. Look, John. Do you have no idea who Karkat's girlfriend could be?  
GT: uh… he used to like terezi. the weird blind girl. i mean, she's just weird because she's weird, not because she's blind. i mean, she's definitely both of those things but they're not related.   
TT: I should hope you don't talk to Karkat about her that way.   
TT: I'd take a leaf out of my brother's book and visit you in order to punch you in the genitals if you talked about my girlfriend that way.  
GT: wow, okay. one, i forgot that you can be really mean sometimes rose, and two, i always forget that you're a proper lesbian.  
TT: I really should get my proper lesbian licence renewed.   
GT: no, i just mean,  
GT: dammit!   
GT: i'm talking to dave now so i'm not thinking properly either.  
TT: Well, this has been an enlightening discussion, John. Thank you.  
GT: you're welcome?

\-- tentacleTherapist [TT] ceased pestering ghostyTrickster [GT] at 01:26 --

Rose picked up her laptop and threw it over onto her bed. She threw her phone as well, but made the good judgement call to carry the beer can over and put it down on the window ledge before flopping over on top of the sheets. 

She could hear the two boys arguing downstairs, their volume suddenly doubled with John added to the mix on the other end of a Playstation headset. She sighed and stood up again to close her bedroom door, because the last thing she needed was two idiots rather than one irritating her. 

Across the Atlantic, Kanaya wouldn't be awake for at least another half hour. 

She plugged in the headphones she had stolen from Dave's room earlier and started up Netflix to help kill the time. Kanaya would be away for another few weeks, but when she got back they were going to move into an off-campus apartment. That had been decided long ago. 

At some point, Rose knew she'd been dozing because she had never heard her phone beep from beside the now-empty beer can. The last of Kanaya's half of their conversation had come through almost twenty minutes earlier. She sent off a reply apologising for falling asleep, disentangled herself from the laptop and headphone cables, and yawned before standing up to go and get a glass of water. 

She had to stop in the entrance to the living room in order to fully absorb the situation. 

She snapped a photo, uploaded it to Instagram, then finally went to collect herself a drink.

+++

For the first time in probably his entire life, Karkat woke up to the strange sensation that he was suffocating. It wasn't that he'd fallen asleep on a couch, or that he was still wearing his jeans and had overheated. It took far too long for him to realise that it wasn't just a sensation, that there was physically something alive and breathing right by his nose. 

It was the cat. 

At some point in the last few hours, the cat had decided that his face was the perfect place to sleep and had probably been there ever since. He groaned and reach for his phone, because while it definitely wasn't morning yet, he could tell he'd been asleep for more than a few minutes. 

His fine motor skills agreed, and let the phone slip from his fingers to the floor before he'd even had the chance to check the time. 

He would have felt bad about waking Dave up as well, but it wasn't technically his fault. In all probability Lalonde would have slept through the clatter of the iPhone and the expletive that followed, but it would have been hard for anyone to sleep through a startled cat trying to run away without hitting a wall. 

"Fuck," Dave muttered. "Fuck, fuck, fuck," he went on, as if he couldn't stop the words from escaping. "Number one, turn the fucking TV off, then the goddamn living room light," he said, gesturing with one hand towards the switch. 

"You do it," Karkat said, rolling onto his back.

"No, this is me not fucking around. Turn off the fucking lights because I can't see shit and I think I'm about to hurl."

"Huh?"

"Vantas, the lights, and get me a fucking plastic bag or something would you?"

Karkat just looked over at Dave, who was already sitting up on the other side of the L-shaped couch. Before he could even get himself to sit up, Dave had thrown himself over the back of the couch and was stumbling towards the kitchen.

Then, just like he'd predicted, was throwing up into the sink. 

"Uhh," Karkat said, following Dave through to the kitchen, but not before scooping his phone up from the floor. "So, four beers is too many?"

"No, sleeping under artificial light from six different sources is too many."

"Too much."

"Too many fucking lumens," Dave snapped with his head still in the sink. "Fuck."

"So, uh. Huh."

"Welcome to Migraine City, population me. Do you know what the official pastime of Migraine City is? It's drugs. Migraine City has a serious fucking issue with prescription drugs and as some kind of fucking shitty city councilman, I need to keep up with all the latest fads."

"You want me to track down some acetaminophen?"

"No, I want you to make sure I don't fall down the stairs so I can knock back eight pounds of A-Grade kiddy heroin."

"What."

"My Tylenol is upstairs," Dave said, pausing his train of thought while his stomach turned again. "Just let me finish puking up pizza rolls first."

"You nasty fuck."

"I think I can see a string of congealed cheese," he laughed.

At least, he laughed until his stomach sent up another load of vomit.

"You, uh, want me to call anyone?" Karkat offered. He was still hovering around by the kitchen table, just managing to keep a lid on his near-freak out.

"Nah, this is par for the course," Dave said, speaking over the running tap. "It happens, I throw up, I sleep off a codeine hangover. Shit's fine. Look, basically whenever I say hey bro I'm gonna go hit the hay I've got a headache something awful, this is what I'm really doing. Puking more than you thought possible and sleeping for a month. What time is it, anyway?"

"Uh, four thirteen."

"Fuck," Dave said. He spat into the sink one last time and rinsed it all down again, before trying to stand upright. "Can you get a bottle of water from the fridge? They're in there somewhere. This is totally going to make me sound like a fucking ninety year old man, but I was dead serious about falling down the stairs. Walk like two steps behind or something."

"Are you sure you're okay? Like, I'm pretty sure I've seen this shit on _House_ once or twice and it was a brain tumour."

"You're worse than WebMD. Look, it'll be fine. I need to get upstairs then you can sleep wherever the hell you like. Take Bro's room."

Karkat didn't say anything in response to that. He couldn't think of anything to say so he just followed Dave, two steps behind, all the way upstairs and into his room. He just watched Dave collapse onto his bed, face first, and stood awkwardly in the doorway trying to figure out what to do next. 

"Uh," he started. 

"Second drawer on my desk," Dave mumbled. "Pass me the Fours." 

"Holy shit, you've got Tylenol 4's just lying around in your fucking room?" Karkat asked. "How the fuck did you get those?"

"'Cause I was like this for a week last year. Down to about five in the bottle. Got plenty of threes, want a four."

"You're only taking one, right?"

"For now."

"For the next three days," Karkat pointed out, shaking one of the pills from the bottle. Dave was right; there were only four left after he took the one. 

"For now," Dave insisted. 

"My parents are both fucking doctors you absolute moron," Karkat said. He put the bottle back in the drawer and closed it, quietly, then held out the water bottle and the pill. 

He didn't expect Dave to exchange them for his shades. 

"Put those somewhere. Expensive," he said. He swallowed the pill dry in favour of sitting up, but left the bottle of water to lie safely within reach in case he needed it at some point. "Fuck off, go sleep somewhere."

"Where?"

"Bro's room. Next one up."

"I can't do that. Dave? Dave!" 

Karkat sighed when he got no response, but hightailed it out of the room when he realised how awkward it was to be standing in Dave's bedroom while Dave was asleep in it. The only thing more awkward, he realised once he'd closed the door behind him, was having no fucking clue what to do. 

He was the only one awake in Dave's house, at four-thirty in the morning, and he'd basically been instructed to go and sleep in Di-fucking-Stri's bedroom. 

After a literal five minutes of hesitation, Karkat let out an irritated noise and flung open the door to Dirk's bedroom. He didn't know what he was expecting, but the room was almost empty. There were a few crumpling posters on the walls, thick drapes hanging open by the window, and an open door that led to the ensuite. There was nothing about it that screamed many details about the previous owner. Even the comforter was a solid colour. Dave's mom had no doubt gone through and given the room a good vacuum and clean out, but he'd been expecting at least something. 

Despite all of that, Karkat couldn't bring himself to actually walk into the room. With a disgruntled sigh, he closed the door again and doubled back past Dave's room to the stairs. He paused outside Rose's room, just for a second, to see if she was awake, but the house was silent. 

He lay back down on the couch, this time in darkness, and slept.

+++

Dave was entirely convinced that as a member of the Lalonde family, he was a thorough disappointment to both Roxy and Dirk because he'd never been so completely shitfaced he couldn't stand up.

At seventeen, his mother was already a bona fide alcoholic whose talents included being an all around genius and not letting anyone around her realise she was a bona fide alcoholic. She had told him stories of her teenage years that always culminated in her never quite remembering the endings, or ran on into life lessons such as always keeping spare quarters in your bra for a payphone. He'd never needed either of those things, but he figured that the advice was pretty solid. 

Dirk had been a textbook teen pain in the ass. He drank, he smoked, he dabbled in whatever cheap 80s party drugs came his way. Two of his tattoos were from before he was even eighteen, but he'd never failed an exam in his life. 

He didn't have confirmation of his suspicions, but Dave was keeping a close eye on Rose because he was worried she was headed down the same path as their mom, only without the payphone advice. 

He was fairly sure, although not entirely convinced, that he was the first to harbour something of an affinity for codeine hangovers. 

He'd always thought it was because the twinge of nausea and dull headache were reminders that he'd survived whatever had been trying to kill him. He was awake, alive, ready to take on another day. He hadn't died in his sleep, his brain hadn't imploded because of the migraine, his heart was still beating. All the side effects the Tylenol-codeine mix threw at him served only as a reminder that he was a survivor of his own imminent mortality. 

None of that, however, meant that he actually wanted to get out of bed. 

He was still a little hazy around the edges as he shifted, trying to work his phone out from the pocket it was still in from the night before. He opened his eyes just long enough to make sure he was calling the right number. 

"Hi, baby. What's up?"

"I'm still wearing jeans," he mumbled. 

"What?"

"What?"

"Hi, Mom." 

"Hi, baby. You called me, everything okay?"

"Yeah, codeine headache. I think I woke up and took a second one before, but I'm not sure. I'll tell you later."

"Just for fun, or what? Because I'm doing some kind of wannabe AA program right now and I don't want to throw you into the NA meetings or anything. That'd be one trashy family moment, huh? Yeah, just me and my kid here to kick all the habits," Roxy said. 

Dave could hear a TV on in the background. She was in Switzerland again and he was too tired to work out the time difference. It probably would have been easier if he even knew what time it was in New York, but that was beyond the point. 

"I did a lot of driving yesterday, then fell asleep downstairs. You know how that goes." 

"Don't tell me you threw up on the rug again because between you and the cat I don't know how that thing is still holding up."

"I blame Karkat, it's his fault for living so far away. Or maybe it's yours for putting our house here." 

"We've been through this before, I just really like the atmosphere of the woods," Roxy said. "Anyway, what about Karkat?"

"Can he stay for a few days?"

"Sure, baby. Why?"

"Because I don't really want to drive him back to the city."

"No, why's he there?"

"I dunno, I was bored. I thought it'd be funny to see him out of his natural habitat?" Dave suggested. He finally sat up and found the water he'd brought upstairs the night before; he had to pause his conversation in order to drink at least half of the 16oz bottle without stopping. It also gave him time to think up a reason for driving Karkat almost to the border without admitting he'd planned on crossing over into Quebec. "And he wanted to see Paul's setup in case he doesn't really have the room for it at his place."

"Actually, that's a pretty good idea. So, whatcha gonna do for the rest of the afternoon?"

"What time is it?"

"Almost nine."

"So…" Dave trailed off to think. "Shit, it's almost three." 

"You had plans?"

"Not really, but I didn't intend on leaving one of my best bros at the mercy of my sister for half a day."

"You better get going then. Call me tomorrow, baby, let me know you're still okay." 

"Peachy, mom. Just peachy."

"Don't forget to brush your teeth."

"Oh my god, bye Mom." 

Dave hung up. He leaned back against the wall and let his head connect with the poster-covered plaster. Still holding his phone and turning it slowly in his hand, he just sat with his eyes closed and listened out for whatever noises he could make out coming from downstairs. 

He couldn't hear much, not with the door closed, and he had to make one more call before he got up, because if he didn't do it now he'd forget. If he forgot, he'd get one hell of an earful. 

He reached over to crack the curtains open, only just, as he listened to the dial tone. 

"Hahaha, so you're finally calling to tell me all about your exploits, huh?"

"What?"

"What do you mean 'what', you little shit?"

"What do you mean what do I mean, you huge cockhole?"

"Dude, should I be grounding you for that? I'm pretty sure I should be," Dirk said. Dave heard him laughing though, so if nothing else he had reassurance that the hadn't woken him up. 

"Do it, I dare you. This body cannot be contained by a simple grounding. You're not here to enforce it, Mom's in Switzerland. There's nothing you can do except throw a grounding out into the universe and hope it sticks," Dave said. 

"Do it, I dare you. Defy my grounding and watch how quickly I cancel your 6 Plus pre-order." 

"Okay, okay, jeez," he said, relenting faster than even he had expected. "White flag, I surrender, all that bullshit."

"Dude, you're such a pushover. You're supposed to be like _yeah, well fuck you, I'll buy it myself, just you try and stop me_ or something," Dirk pointed out. 

"Nah, shit would be awkward. Like you'd see me in line anyway, we'd have to make small talk, I might as well shut up and let you pay for it." 

"Look, do you really need the one twenty eight gigs on that thing? That's the real question here. Like, what do you need that much built in storage for when you back everything up to the cloud?"

"Way to make yourself sound old as fuck. All, _kids these days with their clouds and fruit-based cell phones_. Like if that's a challenge don't get me wrong I'll take you up on it but you're a fucking moron if you think it'll take me more than an hour," Dave said. 

He picked out a pair of glasses from his top drawer and flipped them up onto his head; he had no idea where his prescription lenses were but the gold Aviators were still probably his favourite stock pair. He made to check in the second drawer, but the bottle of Tylenol was already open beside his mouse. Luckily, even in the state he'd been in at whatever time he'd woken up during the night, he'd managed to pick out the Tylenol 3s.

"But for real, how's your totally platonic bro-bonding time in the woods going?" Dirk asked. 

"God fucking dammit, Rose," he swore. "Okay, here's something to shut up that train of thought before you try to force it. This is me officially filing a migraine report with Strider the adult edition."

"Fuck."

"Yeah, now you feel like an ass, right?" 

"Nope. Report filed though, you feeling okay?"

"Yeah. I gotta go."

"Be safe."

"Fuck off." 

Dave hung up. 

With both the adults notified and the only possible argument being over who he called first, he started reading through his alerts on the walk to the bathroom. He flipped his glasses down onto his nose as he left his bedroom and started deleting the unimportant notifications, like the Facebook friend requests and the tumblr notifications, because they were all things he wanted to check properly later on. He cleared out anything from Instagram and scrolled back up through the conversation John had started, pausing his reading long enough to take a piss. 

When he got to John's three latest messages, he almost speared himself in the cheek with his toothbrush. 

\-- ghostyTrickster [GT] began pestering turntechGodhead [TG] at 11:31 --

GT: haha, wow dave!  
GT: you and karkat sure are tuckered out, huh?  
GT: ...dave?   
TG: what are you talking about egbert   
GT: finally woke up, huh? isn't it really late over there?   
TG: need my beauty sleep john  
TG: this face isnt gonna stay this way without me putting in the effort   
TG: and mom always said that getting enough sleep is the best thing for it  
TG: in retrospect she was probably talking about hangovers but   
TG: okay what the fuck were you talking about before   
GT: rose put a photo of you and karkat on instagram.  
GT: i saw it on facebook.   
TG: of course you did  
TG: get a fucking instagram  
TG: youre like my best bro ill promo you  
TG: get you loads of followers   
GT: no thanks.   
TG: offers there  
TG: but anyway what photo did rose post so i know how hard to hit her   
GT: uh.   
TG: relax im not really going to hit her  
TG: maybe throw her into the river  
TG: but thatll be her fault for not having better balance   
GT: i guess you must have fallen asleep on the couch?   
TG: yeah that happened   
GT: wow okay.   
TG: youve never fallen asleep on a couch before   
GT: not with another guy!   
TG: dude my couch is so big its effectively two couches  
TG: call the gay police  
TG: sorry officer whats the problem  
TG: you fell asleep on the same piece of furniture as another dude youre under arrest  
TG: no officer please it wasnt intentional  
TG: sorry kid we just cant take any chances in cases like these   
GT: dave! i didn't mean that, i just meant.  
GT: isn't karkat dating terezi??   
TG: he could be dating both of us   
GT: haha that's not even a thing!   
TG: ...what kind of shitty sex ed did you get that you think sleeping in the same room as someone else is not only gay but is also cheating   
GT: i don't think i did? i mean, dad told me all about it. that was awkward!   
TG: problem number one   
GT: also i think he made me stay home that day?   
TG: oh my god   
GT: what?   
TG: you got the talk from your dad  
TG: and apparently he gave it to you back in the 50s   
GT: no, it was like, four years ago?   
TG: okay this has been one hell of a conversation  
TG: but im really not prepared to be the one explaining this shit to you  
TG: especially not at seventeen  
TG: jesus  
TG: do some reading before college egbert  
TG: put my mind at ease  
TG: for now lets just confirm that im definitely not dating karkat okay  
TG: and if i was it wouldnt be gay   
GT: the no homo thing is real?   
TG: no john because hes got a fuckin girlfriend  
TG: so by definition hes not gay   
GT: oh.   
GT: well.   
TG: john   
GT: what?   
TG: dont tell your dad i told you this shit because hell probably blame me when you fall from grace  
TG: i dont want that burden   
GT: haha, whatever dave.   
GT: i have to go anyway, i have a lesson.   
TG: sure you do   
GT: a piano lesson dave!   
TG: sure you do

\-- ghostyTrickster [GT] ceased pestering turntechGodhead [TG] at 15:04 --

It was only when Dave went to spit that he realised he'd had the toothpaste in his mouth for almost ten minutes and half of his face was numb. 

He was part way downstairs when he got a Snapchat from John, sitting at his piano. It was followed by another of the sheet music he was reading and Dave was fully prepared to admit that he had no idea what any of it was supposed to be. _looks hells of complicated_ , he sent back, over a photo of his own feet on the stairs. 

"So apparently John got all his sex ed from his dad and thinks that you can catch gay from couches," he announced to the open living area. The TV was on so he knew someone was there, but he wasn't sure who until he walked into the kitchen. 

"What?" Karkat asked. Apparently he was the one at the TV, with Rose and her laptop occupying the kitchen table. 

Dave grabbed the bottle of Minute Maid from the fridge and sat down in the chair next to his sister. 

"Apparently Rosie thought it would be fun to Instagram the shit out of us at like two in the morning, you know, when we were asleep and couldn't tell her that it was an ugly photo and if she was going to be a bitch about it she could have at least made sure it was a decent photo," he explained as he unscrewed the juice cap. 

"That's an oddly specific response to the question."

"Look, I'm sure it's a terrible photo because it was taken at two in the morning under artificial light. No one looks good in that." 

"How did John even see it?" Karkat had paused his game by then, and moved to sit opposite Rose at the table. 

"She cross posted to Facebook."

"Of course she fucking did." 

"I thought it was novel," Rose said. "I've told you before, Dave. You're a much better brother when you're asleep." 

"And I like you more when you're in Jersey."

"Well, now that we've got all of those pleasantries out of the way," Rose went on, unable to keep the small smile from creeping into her face. "Can we please go back to discussing John and his admittedly large gaps in what seems like common knowledge?"

"In a making fun of him kind of way or let's see how much we can fuck with him kind of way?" Dave asked.

"A little of each, perhaps. I only want to drag this conversation out because on top of what you've just mentioned, last night he told me that he keeps forgetting that I'm a, and I quote, _proper lesbian_. I thought it was almost endearing."

"Dude that's like at least eighty percent of your personality," Dave said, getting up again. This time, he switched on the oven and poured a bag of chicken nuggets onto a tray. "Man, I would pay serious cash for a photo of his face when I told him it's possible to be banging two people at once." 

"Oh, you didn't?"

"Not in those words, it probably would have broken him," he snorted. "Remind me the dino nuggets are in the oven. Can you imagine if we'd had some kind of normal family structure? We'd be so fuckin' weird." 

"Hey, right here Lalonde," Karkat interjected. 

"You don't count. Your parents are doctors."

"Doesn't mean they sat me down and talked about that shit when I was twelve."

"No, it means you get plenty of time home alone to google shit. John had a filter on his internet until like a year ago." 

"Hahah, really?" Karkat laughed. "That explains a lot." 

"Yeah. I mean, but seriously. What the hell is our family, Rose? I've spent a lot of time thinking about this in the last few years." 

"By that, he means sulking over facts," Rose said, speaking directly to Karkat who raised the corner of one eyebrow to acknowledge he'd heard her. 

"Shut the fuck up Rose. But look, I've got a sister right here who's actually my cousin, because my mom is actually my aunt but there's no way I'm never calling her mom. My uncle is actually my dad who I can never actually call dad with a serious face because fuck that noise. My mom has some kind of boyfriend somewhere so I've got a mom and effectively a stepdad I've never met, and I've got a dad and a stepdad I have met and who's pretty cool. And we've got grandparents, I guess, but we've only met them like three times because Mom and Bro stopped talking to them basically as soon as they left home," Dave paused in his story for long enough to drink some more juice straight from the bottle. "Look, what I'm trying to say is can you even imagine what it would have been like to have a normal family?"

"No," Rose said. "But unlike you, I don't sit and overanalyze it. That kind of thing tends to scare guests." 

"Hey, don't look at me," Karkat said, looking only a little taken aback. "My so called normal family managed to produce me and Kankri, so who the fuck knows."

"Well," she said. "Now that we've gotten all that out of the way, do you have any plans for this afternoon or should I not even bother asking for the keys to the shitbox?"

"Uh," Dave thought, glancing down at his phone. "Nuggets, then probably a trip to town because I just cooked all the nuggets. You want to come?"

"I suppose so," Rose agreed. "And after that?" 

"Karkat's been here for like half a day and I haven't punched him yet, so probably Mario Kart 8."

"You're on, bitch," Karkat said. 

Playing online was a whole different ballgame than playing in the same room. 

"You have to sit on the floor though or John'll have an aneurysm."

+++

In the end, Karkat stayed for another three nights. Between the fact it was a two hour drive to the train station and that the only thing waiting for him at the end of the line was a conversation with his brother, hanging out upstate seemed like the better option. He wasn't in the way, he had his laptop, and it was admittedly a nice break from the city. 

It quickly became obvious that when August rolled around and Dave moved to Manhattan for college, he was going to have one hell of an adjustment period. There was no noise out in the woods. They could go outside whenever they wanted and the house was designed to make use of the surrounding area, including the trees. They blocked the late afternoon sun in the right places and let the light in during the afternoons. They hung over the river and provided branches to jump from over the deeper patches of water. Any one of the teens could get in a car and drive for miles without seeing another person before finally hitting the smallest town Karkat had ever spent time in, at least in America. 

The drive back to the station at Plattsburgh was no different. The roads were quiet, the windows were down, and Dave was unable to stop taking his hands off the wheel to tap his fingers along with the beat. 

"Okay look, I can keep driving because we all know I've got literally no other plans, you feel me?"

"Dave," Karkat sighed. He pinched the bridge of his nose and then adjust the seatbelt across his chest. "I'm not going to get stabbed on the fucking subway." 

"Dude, I never said that." 

"Look, white kids who think they're tough shit aren't going to risk pissing off a brown guy on a train, because at the end of the day they're racist as fuck. It works in reverse, too, because the brown guys think I'm not the right kind of brown because they're even more fucking racist somehow? Look, the moral of the story is that I'm older than you so shut the fuck up and keep driving." 

"Hey, if that's the best example you've got then I'm fucked, right? I mean, look at this," Dave took a hand off the wheel again to gesture to himself. 

"No, I told you before I'm not even looking in your general vicinity because of the running shorts."

"They're not even that short." 

"They really are though," Karkat pointed out. "And I know that they're a legitimate thing you own and a thing you actually use for running track, but I don't know how much of the decision to wear them right now is just you fucking with me." 

"It's not all about you, dude. I'm fucking with Rosie." 

"I don't even want to know, put the Beastie Boys back on, we're done."

"Look, I have never in my life violated dress code. Except maybe once or twice and that would totally have been on purpose. See?" Dave asked, trying contort himself into a strange position in the drivers' seat. "My hemline is totally lower than my fingertips." 

"The fact that that's a school rule and not even a thing in the real world aside, you have freakish proportions so that discredits you from being able to measure your own hemlines."

"If you're worried that my junk is about to fall out I'm gonna have to guess that you think I'm not wearing underwear? Or that you don't know how underwear works? Why the fuck are you thinking about my underwear, Vantas. Why. Tell me that." 

"Oh my god, shut up!"

"Yeah, that sure was a conversation. Want to put it on the 'too embarrassing, never mention it again' list?" 

"Fuck, yes." 

Somehow, not only did Dave manage not to keep adding to the conversation but he managed to keep quiet for almost twenty minutes, with the exception of singing along to Spotify. 

He pulled up in the Amtrak parking lot with twenty minutes to go before the train arrived. 

"Look, if nothing else you totally got to sleep in Bro's bed. You can go home and tell everyone about it."

"Don't make it weird. Later, Dave," Karkat said, climbing out of the car. He slammed the front door and opened the rear to collect his backpack.

"Paul says bye."

"Cool."

"She likes you." 

"Oh my god."

"No really, she wasn't aggressive or anything so she should totally be okay to move in." 

"Dave." 

"And I mean it's what, over halfway through July? So there's like four or five weeks left until then? It's probably important that she got to meet you for real."

"Dave!" 

"What?"

"I have to get on the fucking train now." 

"I'm gonna tell everyone you slept in his bed."

"Yep, there it is, you made it weird. Fuck off." 

There was no point in waiting around for the train to actually pull up, so Dave just put the car in reverse and waved as he pulled out of the parking lot.

While he genuinely had forgotten about needing passports to go to Canada, the whole ordeal had worked out well enough in the end. It had been pretty great to have someone else around to help break up the time spent alone or with Rose. His mom was scheduled to be home the next day and he was pretty excited to go and pick her up from the airport, especially since she'd been gone for almost two weeks. 

He was looking forward to those last weeks of summer, the ones where Rose would already be back at college because she was moving into an off-campus apartment, and he would be left to spend the time with his mom. 

She'd always been a constant in his life. Dirk was more like an omnipotent being and had been living on the opposite coast of the country for what felt like years. But his mom had always come home to upstate New York and he had no idea how he was going to get by without knowing she was working somewhere nearby. 

The worst thing was knowing she'd be alone.

As he turned the car around though, he realised that it didn't matter. None of it did. Rose had moved out, Dirk had moved out, and now he was going to move out. His mom was tough as shit, she'd dealt with so much in her life that one more kid moving out of home was nothing. They called and Pestered and Snapped and Instagrammed each other all day every day as it was, what did it matter if they were all effectively in different states?

He took a hand off the wheel long enough to switch his phone over to the Strider-Lalonde Spotify playlist that they'd all been carefully cultivating for months. 

One of Roxy's additions blared out from the car speakers and he laughed, because even though he was moving out, his confusing so-called excuse of a family was arguably the greatest hot mess in all of paradox space.


	2. [A5A1]: what's the largest bowl of fries?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which all but one member of the family is able to sleep.

**August, 2014**

"Kanaya, I feel I may need some assistance."

Kanaya paused mid-way through slicing a carrot that was meant for their soup. Rose's request for help wasn't rushed or urgent, but the absence of any obvious need to hurry was almost more of a concern in itself. She put down the knife, wiped her hands on the tea towel, and proceeded around the counter to join Rose at the dining table. 

"Assistance of what kind?"

"I can't seem to put my finger on the words I need."

"You're the literature major. Surely you should know all the words."

"Oh, I do know all the words. I just don't know which ones to use in order to prevent my mother from visiting us in three days time."

"Have you considered, 'mother, please don't visit us in three days time'?"

"I don't have time for your sass," Rose said, a coy but telling smile on her face as she typed out a reply to something on her laptop screen. "As far as I can gather, she's just dropped Dave back at his dorm and is feeling a sudden onset of guilt for leaving us both alone in the world."

"Tell her you have a prior commitment?" 

"To Netflix?"

"It's certainly not a lie."

"But it certainly is a terrible truth to tell."

"A murky lie that can easily be replaced later on?"

"Probably the best course of action," she agreed. "Are you sure you wouldn't like some help with that?"

"Very. There isn't much you happen to be worse at than keeping things tidy, but cooking seems to be it," Kanaya said. 

Knowing that Rose's problem was at least pacified for the moment, she stood up to return to the pile of vegetables still waiting on the kitchen bench. 

"Cruel."

"But true."

"Admittedly so," Rose sighed. "Do you feel that Zazzerpan's arc is moving too quickly? I can't decide."

"I suppose it depends how long you intend for this story to be," Kanaya suggested. 

"At least half a dozen tomes. Each big enough to knock out an old woman, preferably. I feel the story would suffer woefully if each entry in the series isn't large enough to knock out old women." 

"That feels excessive." 

"So does your meal preparation." 

For the most part, Rose had never really had to worry about cooking for herself. Her uncle had always done the majority of it until he moved out, and even then her mom had stepped up and supplied reasonable meals. She was always the last to offer assistance in the kitchen, and as a result, she was an even worse cook than her brother - he could manage most breakfast foods and knew how to make a frozen pizza more interesting. 

Kanaya at least knew how to make a handful of good, hearty meals from memory and was competent when it came to following recipes. In return, Rose was responsible for making sure that rent and bills went through on time, on top of at least attempting to hang up her towel after showering. 

They had decided not long into the previous school year that, if all went to plan, they would look into off-campus accommodation for the next. They'd found a small, single bedroom apartment about five miles out that meant when Dave's infamous shitbox of a car finally died, the bus ride into classes wouldn't be unreasonable. 

The hardest part of the plan had been striking a deal with both her own mother and Kanaya's. The cost of accommodation had immediately halved with them living in the same apartment and not separate dorm rooms, but the money still had to come from somewhere. They'd been told that provided they picked up a few casual shifts a week at a workplace of their choice to cover everything else, rent would be covered in much the same way that their dorms had been paid for in their Freshman year. 

Rose had picked up a few hours at the campus bookstore, while Kanaya was still waiting for something similar that was within the parameters of her student visa. 

"If, every night night for a week," Kanaya said. She paused long enough to scoop up the carrot chunks and move them into a pot. "If I make something in large portions, then we'll have at least a month of meals cooked and frozen in advance. Even you can manage the microwave."

"I am a champion microwaver," Rose agreed. She typed out another sentence, deleted half of it, and finished it a second time. "How many consecutive pages do you think I could feasibly fill with mere descriptions of the Learned?"

"How many?"

"Yes, I'm not sure if I should limit myself or just dedicate a chapter to the explanation," Rose clarified. 

"I thought you already had a number in mind," Kanaya said. She moved the soup pot over to the stove and poured in enough stock to cover the vegetables. "Would you like to do something else while this cooks or are you concentrating?"

"I am unfortunately, in the words of my brother, entrenched in this shit."

For the rest of the evening, Rose was entirely focused on her work. With the exception of dinner, when she paused her writing long enough to eat some soup and attempt conversation, she was completely shut off from the outside world. 

Kanaya maintained a lively conversation with herself and Rose's single-syllable responses while she separated the soup for freezing, did the dishes, and explained that she was going for a bath. When she emerged from the bathroom almost an hour later and announced that she was going to lie down and watch YouTube videos, Rose barely even looked up.

The disappointment Kanaya felt over accidentally falling asleep alone was inconsequential compared to what she felt when she woke up in the same position. 

"Rose?" 

The apartment was silent, but the lights were still on in the dining area. 

"Rose, it's very much the middle of the night," Kanaya said, yawning as she stepped out of the bedroom. "Oh. Fuck."

Rose's laptop was still open on the dining table, the cursor still ticking at the end of her last sentence. The screen was littered with large paragraphs of exposition and notes to herself in the margins, single words here and there as well as reminders. A bag of chips was open on the table, beside a half-empty bottle of wine that seemed to have no accompanying glass. 

Rose herself was slouched over the table, asleep, precariously balanced on the edge of her chair. 

Kanaya sighed and started tidying up around Rose while she slept. She took the laptop and saved the document twice, once to the desktop and once to Dropbox, entitling it with the day and time. The chips bag was rolled down and pegged closed before it went into the snack cupboard. It took her a moment to locate the cap for the wine but Kanaya found it by the sink, as if Rose had considered using a glass but then changed her mind. She screwed it back on and put the bottle up in the cupboard over the stove. 

"Alright, I don't want to alarm you but this is not the most comfortable of places to sleep," Kanaya said. She stood behind Rose's chair and gently lifted her head off the table. "Rose, you can't stay here all night."

"Huh?"

"You fell asleep while working again."

"No, no, that's wrong," Rose said, yawning loudly. She tipped her head back against Kanaya's stomach and looked up, smiling through her weariness. "I need to pee."

"Go do that," Kanaya said, helping Rose to her feet. 

"Did I leave myself notes?"

"So many notes," she assured her. "They're all there, all safe."

"You're wonderful," Rose said, pressing a kiss to Kanaya's cheek. 

"You needed the toilet."

"Oh, yeah," Rose laughed. "I'm tired, not drunk," she assured her. 

Kanaya didn't reply, only half because the bathroom door was already closed and there would have been no point. Instead, she just switched off the overhead lights and went to lie back down in bed. 

Rose fell in beside her a few minutes later, arms sliding up around her to hold on tightly. 

"Just tired," Rose assured her. "Go to sleep."

Kanaya sighed, but didn't say anything. She just held on in return and listened to Rose's breathing slow down as she drifted back off to sleep.

She fell asleep not long after, surrounded by a haze of warm summer air that smelled unsurprisingly like shampoo and wine.

+++

Roxy Lalonde had never been one to skip out on a good old fashioned stare down, but she was unwilling to get into that kind of a competition with her hotel minibar. 

With Dave safely back in his dorm for the night and nothing else on the agenda until the next morning, she had briefly considered going to sleep in her Manhattan office rather than the hotel. Once upon a time her office had been large enough for two people to inhabit comfortably, but she rarely used the space and had told the company to give her something smaller. They had obliged, moving two other employees in and shifting her into a small room that had once housed two photocopiers. 

There was still room for her couch though.

She could have gone in, unquestioned, and slept on the couch. She could have called the hotel and asked for a dry room. But, in the end, she was far too proud and far too determined to be brought down by a fridge that she could easily throw out a window. 

Half her life, she was certain, had been spent in hotels. There were endless distractions. As soon as she had kicked off her shoes, she started investigating. The AC remote was lying in plain sight so she turned it up to start cooling the stuffy room. She turned the TV on and tuned into a _Big Bang Theory_ rerun, because if nothing else there was plenty of distraction in searching for errors on the background whiteboard algorithms. Without fail, she was guaranteed no less than five consecutive episodes, so that would kill a few hours. 

She wandered into the bathroom and examined all the free shampoo and soap, laughed at how hotel hair dryers were still completely ineffectual despite it being 2014, then set out the bath mat and a towel for the morning. She went back out into the main room, sat down on the edge of the bed, and muted the TV. 

"Hello? Yes, I'm in 612. What's the largest bowl of fries I can have brought up? Mmhmm. Okay, by soup bowl do you mean entree-sized, or one of those fancy large ones? I'd _love_ if you could use one of those new fancy ones. Mmhmm. Yes. All three. Oh, before you go, could you also find a bottle of tonic water? No, just the water. Yes, I'm sure. Thanks, hun." 

Roxy hung up. 

She turned the volume back up on the TV and sat back to wait for her fries. She wanted to call Dave, but it had only been an hour since she'd last checked up on him. Rose had made it very clear she was preoccupied, and Dirk was no doubt busy with Dave online. She couldn't call her brother, but she could text him. That wouldn't be too disruptive to the boys' gaming time. 

She considered forcing both of them onto Steam instead, but didn't want to go through the motions of setting up her laptop just to have one of them crap out after half an hour. There were a few other people she could have called, plus a few she really should have called just to check in, but she was determined to fill her own time. 

The decision was made. Fries were ordered. TV was on. 

She lasted an hour before she texted Dirk. He was sympathetic in all the right ways, asked the right questions which prompted the answers she didn't even know until he asked. After ten minutes of sending messages back and forth, she cut off the conversation with a reminder for him to send Dave to bed at a reasonable time. 

The best option, it seemed, was to just give up and call it a night. She'd been awake at five in the morning and had spend two hours helping Dave pack the last of his things into the van. They'd given his room a final sweep for anything he wanted to take, then checked the basement and living room for anything of his that needed to make the trip to Manhattan. 

She couldn't be bothered taking a shower, not when she was planning on having one in the morning anyway. She was already in her pyjamas, but there was one more call she had to make before she could let herself sleep. 

She dialled. The line clicked as it connected.

"Hi, honey. Have you finished with dinner or should I call back?"

+++

"Is that dinner, or a snack?" 

Dirk had heard the front door open a few minutes earlier, but he had just assumed that Jake would keep walking past the living room and go straight for the bathroom like he usually did. 

It seemed obvious to Dirk that you shouldn't just sit around on your clean furniture in clothes that were covered in who knows what from a zoo, but the thought had apparently never occurred to Jake until he'd pointed it out. It had taken months to force him out of the habit, and even longer to convince him to keep a pair of clean boots under his desk. 

Jake still thought that it was all overkill, even after Dirk had run him through the basics of disease prevention as if he'd never heard it before. 

When Dirk turned away from the TV, Jake held one hand up in surrender as if to prove the point that he planned on staying in the doorway. He folded his arms again and nodded towards the pizza on the coffee table, prompting Dirk to answer his question. 

"Depends how hungry you are. Huh? Nah, Jake just got home," Dirk said, glancing back to the TV to put his character somewhere safe. "You just gonna hang out there?"

"As marvelous as I would be as a doorjamb, I get the feeling the filth from my skin would rapidly start to butcher the integrity of the varnish," Jake said. "Don't even try to tell me it already is, Strider. This house is older than you by about half a bloody century and the timber even moreso."

"Yeah, but the varnish isn't."

"We aren't bloody well getting into this malarky already, are we?"

"Hi, Jake," Dirk said, still looking over to the doorway. 

"Hi," Jake replied, pushing his weight off the door frame. "Save some of that for me, I'll be back." 

"It's got olives!" 

"Look, now see here," Jake suddenly turned around and stood back in the doorway to the living room again. "Unless that thing is slathered in peanut butter, I'm going to eat whatever's left of it when I'm done scrubbing this muck out from under my fingernails. Are we clear on the matter?"

"Fuck it, it's all yours if you stop talking about food and the shit under your nails in the same sentence," Dirk said, turning back to the TV with a vague look of disgust on his face. "He works with animals, dipshit, it probably is." 

"Oh, for goodness sakes, it's just dirt. I'm just nowhere near as fastidious with hand-washing at work because I'm just going to get them covered in filth again within the hour," Jake pointed out. 

"Can you please just go for your shower before I take you out back again and hose you down myself?"

"This is all getting a bit too risque for your boy to be listening in on."

"Go for your fucking shower, English. Pizza's all yours," Dirk said. 

He waited until he heard the bathroom door close to continue his conversation with Dave. They were half an hour into a game of _Plants vs. Zombies_ and for the entire time he'd been talking to Jake, Dave had been struggling to protect everything that needed protecting. 

Timezones always made things more difficult, but Dirk had called in his parental right to make the rules and Dave had no choice but to stop playing and go to bed at ten. Dave had made a half-hearted attempt to argue but if his play style was anything to go by, he was already falling asleep in his chair.

They knocked out a few more rounds before Dave gave in and decided to quit just after nine back East. It was good timing on his part, since Dirk had just finished sending a series of texts back and forth with Roxy, the last of which had been her reminding him to send Dave to bed sooner rather than later. He turned off the PS4 and plugged the controller into the charging dock, then took the empty pizza box with him into the kitchen. 

He tossed the box onto the sink and put the kettle on to boil while he backtracked to the bathroom. It was almost six thirty and they were probably going to be awake for a few more hours, since Jake didn't have to work the next day. He did, however, have to be back at work the day after so it wasn't worth ruining his sleep schedule too much for one day. 

With his free hand, Dirk knocked on the cinema door and pushed it open just enough to step inside. 

"Can I come in?"

"I suppose," Jake said, eyeing the mug in Dirk's hand. "Did you put the sugar in?"

"No, I thought I'd forget and see what happens."

"Wise arse."

"Tell me about it. What're you watching?" Dirk asked as he sat down. He passed the mug over to Jake, who took a small sip of tea to test it out. 

" _The Time Machine_. It's just come out on blu-ray this week, it's still fantastic." 

Jake didn't pursue the conversation any further, so Dirk didn't push it. He just sat quietly, watching the 1960s film with only a passing interest because he'd seen it enough times in his life to know the story. 

When Jake went to put his empty mug down a few minutes later, Dirk plucked it from his hand and stood up to leave the room. The movement startled Jake out of his daze and he looked up, smiling at Dirk for reassurance, before he said something about a shower and closed the door behind him. 

Dirk had been dozing on and off for about forty minutes by the time Jake sat down beside him. Despite his intentions for a much longer nap that morning, he'd only managed a few hours of broken sleep and had been waiting for a reasonable hour to roll around since at least three in the afternoon. He listened as Jake went through the motions of plugging his phone in to charge, removing his shirt and throwing it somewhere in the direction of the basket, and finally settling in under the sheets. 

Jake sighed. He turned onto his side and pressed a kiss to Dirk's shoulder before covering the spot with his forehead. 

"Thanks for all that," he said. 

"Busy day?"

"Very. Not unexpectedly so, considering it was both a Saturday and continues to be summer, but every time I went to do something I got delayed, or sidetracked, or got trapped in a cyclical conversation with a very small child," Jake explained. "Things just kept happening."

"Like things do," Dirk said. "They'll keep on happening, you know."

"Hopefully not during my lunch hour."

"Which was how long today?"

"It wasn't. I scoffed half a carrot I was supposed to be preparing for orang utan lunches."

Dirk was going to point out that eating food intended for the animals probably wasn't the best move, but he kept quiet and just shifted his right arm to under Jake's neck. 

"Plans for tomorrow?"

"Lie in, gun range, perhaps a film?"

"Throw in a trip to Ikea and you've got a deal."

"What do you need from Ikea now?" Jake asked incredulously.

"Shelves for upstairs, and a couple of drawers for in the cupboards up there."

"Fine, but we're going to the range first."

"Spoken like a true American," Dirk laughed. 

They fell silent after that. It had been a long day for them both, but neither one felt obligated to elaborate on the reasons. Jake was asleep in minutes.

It took Dirk a little longer to drift off. He spent the next hour moving between various stages of consciousness, but eventually followed suit somewhere around ten.

+++

John Egbert had never, in his entire eighteen years on the planet, been as awake as he was in that moment. 

It was four o'clock in the morning and he hadn't even considered that he should try to sleep. He'd been in bed earlier, but he'd been lying upside down on it rather than in it, and had known perfectly well he had no chance of actually going to sleep.

His personal highlight of the evening had been the hours between five and nine he'd spent sitting on the floor of his room, with his back against the door to keep it closed even against his Dad's best efforts to talk to him. 

He even had a note from his Dad, that had been slipped under the door while he sat there, to say he was going to stop asking and that they could talk about it in the morning. 

Or, he'd had the note for a few minutes, before he'd ripped it up and thrown it out the window. 

He was sure Dad had heard the window slam, because the only attempt he'd made to talk to him after that was a knock on the door to say he was going to bed. 

In between checking his phone or computer for the reply he was now convinced was never coming, he'd lost hours to just staring. He stared at the ceiling, at his posters, out the window. He'd sat down at his keyboard with the intention of working on a composition, but instead he'd plugged in his headphones and played the same Mozart piece five times, because the first four just weren't enough. 

Then he'd gone back to staring. 

There was almost enough evidence to say that he'd fallen asleep in the middle of his floor an hour earlier, but John wasn't ready to accept that. He was too wired, too on edge, too convinced that everything was just too fucking stupid to have fallen asleep. 

It was four in the morning, and he had no chance of finding out just how stupid things were for up to another three hours. 

He checked the clock again to make sure it was still definitely a time that started with a four, then dragged himself to the bathroom for the world's quietest shower. The last thing he needed or wanted was for Dad to accost him on the walk down the hall. Whatever was going on - and John knew there was definitely something going on - it wasn't a thing that he wanted to talk about with his dad any time soon. 

He'd spent almost his entire thirteenth year talking to his dad because he'd had some problems back then, and he wasn't prepared to spend his eighteenth doing the same. 

He showered quickly and quietly and all of his preoccupations with staring at walls aside, he managed to be pretty sneaky about the whole thing. Back in his room twenty minutes later, just after four thirty, but John still had no intentions of falling asleep. 

Jade. He wanted to talk to Jade, but he got the feeling that talking to her would make the whole thing even worse somehow. She would say nice things and be reassuring and probably tell him off for staying up all night, which was exactly what he needed. But he didn't want to risk sending her a message only to find out that she was still out of range. The last time he'd checked, about a week ago, she had been somewhere in Vietnam but could have easily crossed a border without realising it, so she wasn't entirely sure. 

She had, however, mentioned that if she didn't get back to him by the end of the month, he should probably start trying to contact an embassy. 

For a brief moment, he almost had the will to put on a movie. Instead, he lay face down on the carpet, with his phone beside him, continually logging in and out of Pesterchum and wiping away the water that dripped onto the screen from his hair. 

Then, long after he had given up, his phone finally vibrated against the rug. John lifted his head off the floor and straightened out his glasses, before switching over to Pesterchum to finally get the cycle of stupidity started. 

\-- arachnidsGrip [AG] began pestering ghostyTrickster [GT] at 04:37 --

AG: Would you stop that????????  
AG: You're online, we all get it. All of us.   
AG: Stop 8eing such a 8a8y and just talk to whoever you're trying to talk to already.   
GT: oh. it's you.  
AG: Who else would it 8e?  
GT: i wasn't expecting it to be you. it's not even five in the morning here, vriska. why are you awake?  
AG: 8ecaaaaaase (this is where you put the drumroll)  
AG: No? Okay.   
AG: I'm awake 8ecause motels kick you out early, even when you're tired and 8ored of driving.   
AG: Why are you awake?  
GT: because this is stupid and so are you.  
AG: Wow.  
AG: Just wow.   
AG: Do you know how much driving I have to do today, John? Do you?  
GT: not all of it, i hope.  
AG: No. 8ut close to all of it ::::)  
GT: i have to go.  
AG: Really?  
GT: yeah. i've kinda got a lot happening right now?  
GT: maybe i'll talk to you later?  
AG: Fiiiiiiiine.

\-- arachnidsGrip [AG] ceased pestering ghostyTrickster [GT] at 04:43 --

John couldn't have known that there was anyone he never wanted talk to at four thirty in the morning, but Vriska Serket seemed to be it. He let out something that sounded like a whine but was definitely a manly groan, because it was so long since he'd started being angry and upset and confused that he'd almost forgotten the reason why he was so angry and upset and confused. 

Almost. 

Not only was he feeling too many things at once, but now he had Vriska on his tail and it wasn't even sunrise yet. As far as he could tell, there was an hour until then. Without moving from the floor, he started a YouTube playlist of Attack on Titan AMVs because he knew he was scraping the bottom of the barrel when it came to things that would keep him awake for much longer. 

He turned over and stared up at his ceiling, his eyes intermittently closing. He missed part of a track but couldn't tell if he'd dozed off or if he'd just heard it so many times that the music didn't register in his brain anymore. 

It wasn't the audio that had startled him back into consciousness. It was the phone itself, vibrating on the carpet again. He almost told Vriska to go away and leave him alone forever, but it wasn't her font on his screen. 

It was Dave. 

TG: yo dude sorry i crapped out early last night  
TG: whats up


	3. [A5A2]: annihilate is such a strong word

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which a secret is finally revealed.

**August, 2014**

\-- turntechGodhead [TG] began pestering ghostyTrickster [GT] at 08:07 --

TG: yo dude sorry i crapped out early last night  
TG: whats up   
GT: dave!  
GT: you need to get on skype right now!   
TG: dude i just woke up give me some time to adjust   
GT: no dave, i can't give you more time because i've been awake all night as it is!!!!!!!!   
TG: ........................  
TG: you should have just called me i would have woken up  
TG: why didnt you just call me john you massive doofus   
GT: skype, dave!

\--ghostyTrickster [GT] is now an idle chum!--

Despite John's frenzied insistence that he should be awake and on Skype, Dave found it hard to roll out of bed. With his glasses already in place, he glanced over at his new computer desk. It was definitely going to need reorganising, but that was a job for another day because he still had piles of his belongings strewn across the dorm room floor to put away. 

He made it to the bathroom and back without tripping over an errant pair of shoes, so he chalked that up to his first college success. He dropped down into the desk chair and started rearranging his specimen jars while the machine loaded. He probably should have just gone with the laptop, but it was still too early for him to have thought that one through. 

He typed in his password, loaded Skype, and waited for the inevitable call from John. 

"Yo, what's the big deal? Do I get some kind of surprise for surviving one night on my own in the big city? Like, I doubt you'd stay up all night just for that but hell, I'm flattered, Egbert."

"Your mom!" John blurted out. 

"Dude, what are we? Twelve?"

"No, your mom. The photo, I saw it on Rose's Facebook, and that's your mom?"

"The one from last night? Yeah, dude. That's my mom. Don't tell me you think she's hot, for the love of fucking God, don't tell me you think she's hot. Do you know how many people in my life have told me I have a hot mom? Too many is how many. I guess they say the same about my dad? I mean, I don't pay much attention to that part of the internet because it's weird as fuck, but whatever."

The whole time Dave had been rambling, John had been trying to interrupt him. But even though he'd just woken up, Dave's ability to talk at a pace faster than most other people was a force to be reckoned with. When he finally paused for a breath, John seized his moment.

"She's dating my dad!"

That stopped Dave in his tracks. He'd opened his mouth to continue speaking, but John's interruption left him unable to recall what he'd been about to say. Instead, he just sat, stunned, opening and closing his mouth as thoughts half-formed then disappeared. 

"What?"

"That's my dad's girlfriend! They've been dating for like half my life?"

"What."

"So you didn't know?" John asked incredulously. "You didn't know either?"

"Of course I didn't fucking know Egbert, I still don't know!" Dave yelled. "Are you sure? Like, there's got to be millions of blonde ladies that look like my mom in the world."

"She was at my tenth birthday party!"

"What?!"

"Dave, that's her. That's Roxy."

"You know my mom? Oh, fuck. Fuck, this is crazy. It's bullshit, right? This is all bullshit. You're fucking with me, John. No one knows who my mom's dating. Bro doesn't know, I don't know, Rose doesn't know. It's a fucking mystery that we're never getting answers to, Egbert. Never. Mom's love life is off the table, no one knows shit."

"Dave, you're not listening!" John said, interrupting again when Dave's tone switched from shock to defensive. "I know that's her, it's definitely her!"

"Dude, I can't deal with this shit," Dave said, now unable to hold back a short series of sniggers. "I want to be outraged like you are, but I'm honestly still stuck on the fact that me posting a selfie solved the mystery of the ages. If I'd known it was that easy I would have started posting photos of my mom years back."

"Dave."

"Like, what other mysteries can I solve that way? How many decade long mysteries can I solve with Instagram?"

"Dave!"

"John, I'm probably going to explode with rage over this in about a week but for now I don't think I can manage anything other than this kind of batshit laugh-crying thing I've got going on," Dave said. "Can you see this? I'm fucking crying, John. Crying from laughing too hard."

"Dave!"

"What?"

"I'm going bed because this isn't exactly how I thought you would react? I'm really, really tired."

"Okay, you do that, I'm gonna sit here and finish crying, then make some calls and laugh some more. I'm at a complete fucking loss for what to do so it might as well be that." 

It wasn't until Dave had finished talking that he realised John had already hung up on him. 

He sat, just staring at the empty Skype conversation window, trying to figure out what to do next. He'd always wondered what he'd do when he found out any solid information about his mom's boyfriend. Playing the petulant child who just wanted his mom's undivided attention, dragging Rose in to play up the children from hell routine he'd seen in so many movies, the works. He'd thought it all. 

But if his mom was really dating John's dad, well, all that went out the window. 

John's dad was just a regular guy. Dave had seen him once or twice, checking in from the background of Skype calls. He worked in an office, had raised a son on his own, and was the dictionary definition of A Dad. He took John to lessons and competitions, and always sat through the other kids performances just to see his own on stage. He went grocery shopping every Saturday, still did his banking in a physical bank, and held a certain distrust of the internet. 

He was nothing that Dave had ever expected his mom to go for. 

With absolutely no regard for time zones, he reached for his phone and dialed Dirk's number.

"So, probably a pretty random question but you're you in all of your horrific and fucked up man-child glory, so how are you and Jake even a thing? Like, how does that happen? The whole fetish for weapons aside, he's a pretty normal guy." 

"It's five thirty in the morning." 

"I know, I said it's probably a pretty random question." 

"Hang on," Dirk said. Dave heard him sigh, then a lot of movement, footsteps, then a door closing. "Still there?"

"Yeah."

"Look, I'm gonna warn you straight up that it's Jake's day off so I was supposed to get more sleep than this. If you want to keep crapping on right now, you're getting the brutally honest answers." 

"Good. So what's the brutally honest answer?"

"It happened because I liked his ass, gave him my number, and he called me back. It's still a thing because now his ass is just one of an endless list of things I like," Dirk said. 

"Okay, so," Dave started, but then cut himself off. "Dude, are you taking a piss?"

"Yeah. I told you, it's Jake's day off so he's sleeping in the bedroom. It would've been rude as fuck to talk to you in there." 

"Nasty."

"Look, are you having some kind of problem? Girl problem? Guy problem? Other unrelated problem?" Dirk asked. 

"What? No."

"So the purpose of you calling me now is?"

"I know who Mom's boyfriend is."

Dave was sure that Dirk chose that moment to flush the toilet in order to cover up whatever awful name he'd called his sister. 

"Bullshit," he said, when the water stopped. 

"Not bullshit." 

"Why'd she tell you?"

"She didn't." 

"Tell me."

"No way! You'll tell her you know before I can tell her I know."

"Dave."

"I'll tell you later."

"Dave!"

"Dude, calm the fuck down!" Dave shouted, even though Dirk's voice had barely risen above a terse whisper. "You know John?"

"I know about six Johns."

"The one that's not my best friend." 

"You really need to give up that shit. The kid is a huge nerd, so are you, therefore best friends."

"Can your best friend also be your stepbrother?"

"Huh?"

"Mom's dating his dad."

"Seriously?"

"No, I just really want a brother and I thought this'd be a good way to go about it," Dave snapped. 

"This sounds like bullshit," Dirk said, as he sat down on the edge of the bath. "You gotta appreciate this sounds a lot like bullshit."

"John says she was at his tenth birthday party."

"She wasn't even at your tenth birthday party!"

"I know, right?" Dave exclaimed. "Let me tell her that I know, okay? Like, don't fuck it up because he's my best bro and I want to tell Mom she somehow ended up dating his dad."

"So he is your best friend now? Make up your fucking mind." 

"That's not even the fucking point, Bro."

"So how did you two knuckleheads figure this out?"

"Last night I posted a photo of me and Mom on Instagram, shared it to Facebook, and I guess Rose shared it from there because me and John aren't friends on Facebook and he doesn't have Instagram so how else would he have seen it if Rose didn't share it?" Dave explained. 

"It's 2015. Be John's friend on Facebook and force him onto Instagram, then this kind of shit won't happen again," Dirk said. 

"Thanks, Dad."

"Don't start. Look, how long until I get the all clear to give her shit over this?"

"I'm meeting her in like two hours?"

"So text me as soon as the words are out of your mouth. This is like a twelve year in the making shit-giving and the hell I'm waiting until tonight."

"Okay, okay. I'll text, Pester, call, Skype, tweet, Insta, whatever it takes to get your attention," Dave said. "And I'm not being John's friend on Facebook."

"Be nice to your step-brother."

"He still sends Candy Crush invites."

"Okay, fuck that."

"Yeah, see? I'll text you later." 

"Man, this is some twisted bullshit, huh?" Dirk said. "I'm going back to bed, so if I don't reply to your text give me a call to make sure I'm up." 

"Will do," Dave agreed. "See ya."

"Give her shit so I've got something to be proud of you for." 

Dave hung up and threw his phone down onto his desk. It was probably a bad move, since he'd managed to smash the screen three times in doing the same thing in the past, but by the same token he was only months away from the iPhone 6 release and could probably cope until then. 

Besides, it was probably easier to find screen repairs in the city than out in the sticks. 

He stared at the phone lying face down on the tabletop, the curiosity eating away at him slowly until he was overcome with the need to make sure his screen was still in one piece. 

He checked. It was. 

His mom was dating John's dad. 

John, the goofy guy who was, all joking aside, his best friend, was more than likely already or soon to be his step brother. Cousin, technically, but he'd learnt that semantics were complete bullshit when he was fourteen. 

All he could do was laugh. 

He couldn't quite place the kind of laughing loop he was stuck in, but it wasn't entirely good and it was completely bad. His mom, his outgoing, over dramatic, talk a mile a minute mom, had been dating a guy he knew was probably her exact opposite for over a decade. Every time he tried to picture them standing in the same room he started sniggering all over again. 

Dave couldn't remember ever spending so much time dissolving into hysterical laughter. At one point he tried to imagine how they'd even met and ended up almost choking on half a cinnamon sugar poptart. 

\-- turntechGodhead [TG] began pestering carcinoGeneticist [CG] at 09:28 --

TG: so we all know that my life is one dumb event after another  
TG: like  
TG: things just so dumb no one believes anything could be as dumb as that  
TG: so the things just go through school  
TG: with no idea whats happening  
TG: because no one can really believe they dont have a context for anything  
TG: because they really are   
TG: just  
TG: that  
TG: dumb  
TG: and i know youre probably still asleep but i feel like this will be fun   
TG: like to wake up and read i mean  
TG: after you feed paul  
TG: go feed my lizard vantas  
TG: then come back and read the end of this  
TG: because this time the dumb thing is that  
TG: my mom is dating johns dad  
TG: yes that mom  
TG: yes that johns dad  
TG: like what bullshit huh  
TG: no one ever made the connection before now  
TG: and i think that means hes my brother now  
TG: or will be  
TG: or maybe already is?????  
TG: look thats not the point  
TG: the point is you never stopped reading and my dragon is starving  
TG: go feed my dragon you asshole

Dave switched back from Pesterchum to his Chrome window and scrolled past half a dozen tweets then through a few notifications to see if anything interesting had happened. He clicked over to tumblr to read a few asks, ignored most of them, replied to a few that were easy enough, then switched back to his dashboard. 

He checked his emails. He picked up his phone and went through all of his Instagram alerts. He put his phone back down and swapped back to his desktop again to read through a few pages on Reddit. 

He replied to a thread on the official Di-Stri subreddit asking if Dirk had heard of _Five Nights at Freddy's_ and if he was going to play it. Yes, they'd heard of it. Yes, Dirk was planning to stream it on Twitch. No, you shouldn't expect to see him shit his pants over it because whatever a point and click horror game could come up with was nothing compared to his mind. 

Then the inevitable follow-up to prove that yes, it was actually _that_ Dave replying and not someone pretending to be him. Yes, Godhead had always been spelled with a capital G. No, he wasn't going to play the game. No, he wasn't scared. 

At least, he wasn't going to tell Dirk's subreddit that was exactly why he'd been ignoring the game since its release.

Karkat still hadn't replied and he only had ten minutes left before he was supposed to meet his mom downstairs. 

He picked up a shirt from the floor without bothering to check if it was the one he'd worn the day before and threw on the jeans he'd been wearing for a month. Roxy had hung his satchel up on a coat hook before she'd left, which was lucky because he never would have found it if she hadn't. He tossed a spare pair of glasses into it, checked for some Tylenol and his camera, then slung it over his shoulder while he shoved his feet into a pair of well-scuffed Vans. 

At least, for once, his faulty irises were working in his favour. His glasses would buy him some time before Roxy noticed the strange expressions on his face, but he was only expecting to get an extra few minutes out of those. 

He checked his hand twice to make sure he was holding his room key. He checked, told himself he was in fact holding the key, then finally pulled the door closed. 

He grinned awkwardly at a kid passing by who had no doubt heard him mumbling, then muttered something about it not being important before he hurried off down the hall. 

Way to go, Lalonde, he thought, mentally applauding his own efforts. He'd never been great at making first impressions, but some part of him had been hoping the mumbling-center of his brain would switch off for at least a few days while he settled in. 

No chance. The probability of him making it out of the building without running into someone else while he was talking to himself was below zero. That was his luck, it was what he had to work with, and as long as he didn't mutter anything about living in the middle of nowhere for at least a week it would all balance out. 

He told the elevator to go and fuck itself when the doors didn't close the first time he pressed the button. 

Dave almost turned back when he saw Roxy standing out on the sidewalk waiting for him. Instead, he pushed his glasses as far up his nose as they would go, shoved his hands in his pockets, and tried to remember what his normal posture looked like. 

"What's wrong?"

Apparently, his normal posture was not hunched over. He should have known that. 

"Nothing."

"Davey," Roxy warned, looping her arm through Dave's as they started off down the block. 

"What?"

"Did you do something embarrassing?" 

"No."

"Are you being some kind of weird art school bullied already?"

"What? No. It's been one night, Mom."

"So what's with the look?"

"What look?"

"The _I know something I never wanted to know but now I do and I'm not sure what to do with my face anymore_ look," Roxy said. She pulled Dave a step further back from the gutter when they stopped at the corner.

"Mom, please. Nothing's wrong."

"Bullshit, baby."

"Do you call John 'baby' as well or was it just me who got stuck with that one because he's like eight months older than I am?" Dave asked. 

The crossing light changed but Roxy didn't step off the gutter. 

At least, not for a brief moment, but those few seconds were enough to confirm John's outburst from earlier that morning. 

"What? I call you that because you're my baby, baby. And I know you're in College now but I'm sorry that changes precisely fuck all as far as I'm concerned," Roxy said. Dave took a few running steps to catch up to the pace she'd set, which in itself was enough to tell him she was on guard. 

"You're dating John's dad."

"We've been over this before, Dave. Like, we've been going over this for years. This is a mystery you'll never solve."

"I didn't. Instagram did," he said. "Well technically I guess it was Rose because she's the one who keeps sharing photos that I share to Facebook and she's the one who's friends with John because I just couldn't hack that shit. But when we get back to the root of the cycle of stupidity that is social media, it was totally Instagram," Dave explained. "Oh my God, you're not gonna even tell me I'm right even though I know I've busted your shit wide open?"

"No, because you're so far from being right that you've taken a wrong turn into Momma's-Gonna-Get-Pissed-ville if you keep talking about this," Roxy said.

Dave freed his arm from around hers as he slipped his phone out of his pocket and opened Skype. He brought up the conversation he'd been having back on his desktop that morning and hit call, because he knew perfectly well John would have left Skype open and his speakers on. 

It took three tries and him almost tripping down the steps into the subway station, but John finally answered. 

"Hey look, it's for you," he said, brandishing the phone at his mom. She took it, unable to look at the screen because it had already locked, and said hello. 

"Hello?" Roxy said, greeted by silence on the other end of the line. "Hello?"

"Dave? I told you I was going to sleep you huge ugly butt!"

"Johnny?!"

Roxy Lalonde had finally been beaten at her own game. It had taken her son a long time to realise they were even playing a game, but she'd expected to get more than twelve years of straight wins before he started trumping her. 

From the other end of the mobile Skype call, across the country, came what was obviously the voice of the boy she'd known since he was nine years old. 

It took her a moment to think through what she was going to say. 

In the end, she went with the obvious. 

"Johnny, did you really just call Dave an ugly butt?"

She was suddenly having to fight Dave off, because he kept reaching out to try and snatch his phone back. He'd proved his point. As far as he was concerned, the jig was up. 

But from her perspective, it was all just beginning. 

She swatted her son's hand away a third time and gave him one of her patented Mom Is Very Angry looks. He held up his hands in surrender and gestured to a vending machine when she also held out a threatening, waggling finger that told him to pipe down or face the consequences. 

"Roxy?"

"Yeah, Johnny. It's me. I guess this is a surprise, huh?"

"Yeah. I found out last night and couldn't sleep! I mean, I was sleeping just now but only because Dave didn't reply and I kind of got it in my head I had to tell him that I knew before I could sleep? I don't know why I did that," John explained. 

Roxy took a few steps back to the subway entrance to prevent the call from dropping out at an inopportune moment. 

"Yeah, I know. Your Dad was pretty worried when I talked to him last night. He said you were all about the locked doors and the coldest of cold shoulders."

"I guess. He left me a note! I'll say sorry today though. It's a pretty big thing to find out!"

"Yeah, it really is. Let me talk to him about it, mmk? Do you talk to him about Dave much?"

"Not really. Sometimes I just say I've been talking to him, and he's okay with that. I guess it'll definitely be okay now if he knows your Dave is also the same as my Dave!"

"Yeah. It's pretty weird, huh? Look, I gotta go because Dave's back with a coke and I need to tell him that a coke isn't breakfast. Go apologise to your dad and tell him I'll talk to him later, would ya?" 

"Okay. Tell Dave I'm not sorry for calling him a butt."

"Will do, Johnny."

She looked down at the phone as John hung up, catching a glimpse of his Skype profile picture before Dave snatched the iPhone back out of her hands. 

"He says he's not sorry for calling you a butt," she said, finally starting off towards the platforms. 

"Johnny?" Dave asked. "Let's back up for a minute here and forget this is some weird fucked up coincidental thing, because I really want to talk about you calling my best bro _Johnny_."

"Why is that the one thing you're hung up on here? We're going to sit down and talk about this before we do your shopping because the hell if this is a subway conversation, but you're caught up on a nickname?" Roxy asked, ushering Dave into the train carriage ahead of her. 

"It's weird as all hell," Dave said, sitting down. He tipped his head back against the wall and closed his eyes, because he knew that he flickering fluorescent tubes would start irritating him soon enough. 

"I call you Davey and I call Rose Rosie. What's different about calling John Johnny?"

"You never call Bro anything cutesy."

"The last time I called him Dirky he was fourteen and had just started growing into his upper arm strength."

"He punched you?" Dave asked, cracking one eye open to look at his mom from behind his glasses.

"No, he clotheslined me on the stairs," she said with a grin. 

Dave snorted.

"Sounds like Bro."

+++

"So, you want to talk about it?" 

Dave looked up from his phone when his mom asked the question. He tried to keep his expression neutral as he nodded, but the telling signs of an oncoming grin crept in regardless. 

They'd dropped the subject not long after Roxy had hung up on John. She'd spent the morning showing him the basics of the subway, because even though he'd been taught when he was younger he'd never had a need to retain the information. They stopped in Times Square so Dave could take the first of his trashy tourist photos. Dropped by Rockefeller Center. The Ed Sullivan Theater. Radio City Music Hall. Any building or location that was even semi-famous was good enough to stop at for photos because Dave knew that within the month the novelty would wear off, and that if nothing else, he could use the photos for a project later on. 

They ran through the subway map a few more times on their way back downtown. As they passed certain stops Roxy pointed out what was above ground, nudging Dave with her shoulder as she scolded him for taking more selfies than notes. 

She'd posed for more than a few herself. 

They were sitting in a small restaurant in the middle of Chinatown when Roxy offered to continue their conversation from hours earlier. 

"I dunno, do you wanna talk about it?" 

"Probably not, but what the hell? What do you want to know?"

"Mostly how we all got this far without ever putting two and two together because apparently we're all fucking morons," Dave said, stabbing the last dumpling with his fork. 

Roxy caught the attention of their waitress and ordered another two plates since Dave had inhaled the first. 

"Probably because we're all fucking morons," she said with a sigh. "You're not going to go on one of your batshit freak-outs here in public, are you?"

"What?"

"You've got a tendency to fly off the fucking handle, baby. I'm just making sure." 

"No, I don't."

"You really, really do. Remember what happened when the grocery store only had the unfrosted pop tarts for a month?"

"Look, that was ages ago," Dave pointed out. 

"It was April." 

"Ages."

"The point still stands," Roxy said, pouring each of them a fresh cup of green tea from the pot. "Off the handle backflips into Shitsville are a thing you do sometimes." 

"No shitflips," Dave said, reaching out for his cup. "Maybe some brief falls down the well of what the fuck, but the shitflips are under control." 

"It was just one of those things I always thought would be best to keep from you and Rosie," she explained, launching straight into the story to get it over with. "At first you were just so young. I think I was trying to protect you, because if you didn't know anything then you couldn't get your hopes up. I mean, back in those days everything was a balancing act between being Rose's mom and acting like yours, and bringing someone else into that picture just seemed too complicated? It's the same reason Dirk kept Jake from you for so long. We didn't know how many years we had on dynamic duo mom and uncle schtick." 

Dave nodded. He was slowly tearing the pastry from the dumpling on his fork, dragging the bite-sized parcel out in the hopes their next order would be up soon. 

Besides, he wasn't about to interrupt his mom.

"Introducing you would have been complicated. I couldn't risk either of you getting attached in case it didn't work out, I couldn't say he'd only be a parental figure to Rose. Over time it all just snowballed and ended up in the too hard to explain basket, especially when we had to start being so much more careful about you finding out, well, everything there was to know." 

Dave nodded again. 

"Then when it almost seemed like a good time to bring it up, you broke your arm and got the world's most incompetent nurse, so everything went to shit with you for a while. Rose had her dramatic _no one gets me_ stage and got a girlfriend, you went from headaches to full-blown migraines. It wasn't just you two, either. Everything went to shit again when Dirk moved out so that was a bad time for everyone. John had that whole ordeal a few years back, but that's not exactly lunchtime conversation," Roxy said. 

Dave shoved the last bite of dumpling into his mouth as their waitress returned with more. Roxy thanked the girl, ordered more tea, and wondered how Dave had already managed to sneak two hot pot stickers from the plate without her noticing. 

"Since then it's just been easier to keep it quiet," she went on. "If we did decide to tell you and Rose, it probably would have been this year sometime, now that you're all in college."

"If they move in, John gets the basement," Dave said. He raised an eyebrow over his frames, straddling the fine line between being funny and acting like a petulant child. 

"We'll get you bunks," Roxy said with a wink. 

"So I'm totally not trying to be a dick here, but you're not going to win the award for most conventional parenting style anytime soon. Like, that's not on the cards for any iteration of you in any plane of existence. How'd you end up with Mr. Head-of-the-PTA-Bake-Sale-Committee Egbert?"

"Oh, _God_. You know about that?" Roxy said, unable to contain a sharp burst of laughter. 

"Yeah, John says it's hella embarrassing that he wanted to stay on for next year."

"You have no _idea_ how long it took to talk him out of that. It was a long time ago when we met, you would have only been six. I met him at a conference, or a convention, or something like that. You know, those awful things I used to go to and give talks?"

"That's really lame."

"Yeah, well, not everything can live up to your expectations of cool," Roxy said. "But if you want some serious Mom-to-Dave life advice, prepare to have your socks knocked off."

"Socks prepped, ears functioning at a higher capacity than eyes," Dave said as he put his phone down on the table again. 

"Learn how to use chopsticks, you fucking heathen. If you keep using a fork in a Chinese place you might as well get _Country Bumpkin_ tattooed on your face."

+++

When John finally woke up, it was with half of his body hanging off the edge of his bed and his glasses digging into the bridge of his nose. 

Something must have gone wrong when his brain sent his limbs the signal to roll over, because instead of turning towards the wall and safety, he went cascading to the floor in a tangle of sheets and pillows. 

He got to his feet as fast as he could, because the only thing more embarrassing than falling out of bed at eighteen was not being able to recover from falling out of bed at eighteen. He straightened out his glasses, yawned, and ran his hands through his hair to try and flatten out his unruly cowlick. 

He dropped straight into his chair at the kitchen table when he finally made it downstairs. He yawned again and reached out absent-mindedly to take one of the freshly-baked breakfast muffins that had deliberately been placed in front of his spot, not that he was awake enough to realise it. 

John pulled a face when he realised that the muffins were the oatmeal and fruit kind and not the cheesy bacony kind he'd been hoping for. It was all a trick. He should have known. Fresh muffins were always something to treat with caution in case they existed simply to fool him into thinking they were full of bacon. 

He took another large bite regardless when he heard his dad walking back into the kitchen from the utility room. 

"Morning, sleepyhead," Dad said. He checked his watch and then took a mug from the cupboard to pour John some coffee from the pot. 

"Hi, Dad. Why do these have apple in them?"

"Because I couldn't find blueberries at the market this morning."

"Oh," John said. He watched as Dad topped up the mug with milk and sugar before he sat down in his own chair. "Thanks."

"It's late."

"I know. I mean, I guess it's late because you just said you went to the market this morning? So I guess it's afternoon?"

"Only just. It's twelve thirty." 

"Oh, I had the weirdest dream last night!" John exclaimed, as if the first few sips of coffee had finally kick-started his brain for the day. "I don't remember it all because that's kind of how dreams work but I think I remember the important bits. Well, the really important bit was that I was talking to Dave on Skype because I thought Roxy was his mom. How weird is that?"

"John."

"And I talked to her on the phone, but that was after I thought I went to sleep in the dream, but I guess I dream-woke up for a while because the phone call was one of the important bits, but maybe I'm getting the order of all of these things wrong?"

"John."

"What else?" John paused long enough to drink more of his coffee and to take another bite of his traitor-muffin. "I think you were mad at me for some reason so maybe next time I have a dream and you're in it I should apologise. Would dream-you ground me for not apologising?" 

"Son, just stop."

"Huh?" John said. He finally stopped talking long enough to look over at his dad. With one hand he drank some more coffee, while he used the back of the other so push his glasses up without needing to put his muffin down.

"I spoke with Roxy an hour ago."

"Did you tell her I said hi?"

"She said she spoke to you this morning."

"No, don't be stupid, dad. I said I _dreamed_ that I was talking to her! I was sleeping this morning." 

"Are you having problems sleeping again?"

"What? No! It's not like that, I promise. I'd tell you if it was! I just stayed up late last night and then I couldn't fall asleep, but when I did I had that weird dream," John said, shoving the last of the muffin into his mouth. "I mean, I was up late because," he paused to drink a large mouthful of his overly-sweetened coffee. "Because, I had a dream that, no, that was later. Wait, I'm confused." 

"Are you sure you're okay?"

"Oh my God, Dave is why I was awake! Your Roxy is Dave's mom! I mean, my friend Dave is your Roxy's son, they're the same people! Well, not same people-people but same family? Did you know? Did you _know_ all along and not tell me? Wait, Dave is Rose's brother so does that mean that Rose is going to be my sister?"

"John, calm down," Dad said, reaching across the table to take the still half-filled mug of coffee from his son. "Go back upstairs, put a shirt on, and we'll talk about it all over pancakes."

"Talk about why I have to go and put a shirt on before I can have pancakes?" John asked. When his hand moved ever so slightly after his confiscated cup, his dad stood up and took the coffee with him to the sink. 

"No, you know the rules. Shirts on at the table. I'm fairly certain we don't need to go over that again." 

"Ugh, _fine_ ," John said, pushing his chair out from the table. "But they have to be choc-chip pancakes and they have to come with a side of actual complete truth." 

Even once John returned with a shirt, his dad refused to give back his coffee. John tried to argue that by the end of the week, he could have entire cups of coffee whenever he wanted but his dad had only laughed knowingly. 

It turned out that there wasn't much to the story that John didn't already know, something he was going to definitely taunt Dave with the next time they talked. He'd first met Roxy when he was nine, when the babysitter hadn't been able to come over and instead of going out for dinner, Dad had just invited Roxy to their house. 

John remembered liking her almost immediately. She was nice, pretty, and funny, and that was all that seemed important back then. He met her a few more times after that, as if his Dad wasn't too worried about him not liking her anymore. 

When he was twelve he saw them kiss. It was okay, he'd said at the time, because Roxy was nice and his dad must have really, really liked her if they were kissing the way heroes did in stories. 

It was about a year after that when he told Dad that if he wanted to marry her, that was okay with him. He couldn't remember his mom, but he'd seen enough movies to know that moms were supposed to do everything Roxy had done for him while he'd been having all that trouble. Even though she was only ever around for a few days at a time, she'd stayed up to keep him company when he couldn't sleep, held him safe when he woke up from awful recurring dreams, and promised that she wouldn't tell his dad all the details of the nightmares he relayed to her upon waking in a panic. 

Later on, he realised that she had told Dad, but he knew she'd done it for a good reason.

He knew she had kids of her own that lived on the East Coast. He never knew more than that because it just wasn't important. Over their pancakes, Dad told him he was aware of Roxy's kids, that they seemed a little dramatic but like good enough kids, that he'd known their names from the beginning. They were, however, common names, and John really didn't talk about his online friends that often, so there was never a connection to be made. 

Dad apologised for that, as if he should have known all along. John's only reply was a snort of laughter because he tried to imagine his dad telling the PTA that he'd failed at basic home internet safety. 

Dad explained that sometime in the next few days, they would all sit down on Skype and talk things through. He'd only spent a few minutes on the phone with Roxy that morning, because she had been in a department store at the time, but they were going to sort something out before the end of the week. 

John assured him that it didn't really change his opinions anything. It was just a pretty big shock to find out that Roxy was his best friends' mom. It was going to make things seem a little strange for a while, but not in a bad way. 

His biggest concern was that Rose was going to be his sister. That was weird. She was weird. Dave would be okay. He was a bit of a neurotic dork but he was still good at being friends with people. The Skype call would almost be fun, he explained, because he'd told Dave so many stories about his dad and Dave had told him all about his mom, and now they were all going to meet. 

Dad just smiled, poured him a fresh cup of coffee, and reminded him that he'd better start packing because there were only a few days left before he had to move onto campus.

+++

"Oi! What the everfrigging heck is going on in here?" 

When Jake walked back into the kitchen to investigate the commotion he could hear from the backyard, he found Dirk frozen in front of the dishwasher, hands gripping the edge of the counter and his foot pulled back. 

"Back away from the machinery, Strider." 

"Jake."

"Do _not_ even think about breaking that thing again."

"I didn't break it the last time," Dirk said, slowly lowering his foot and turning around to lean back against the edge of the counter with his arms folded defiantly across his chest. "I just didn't succeed in fixing it." 

"You broke it." 

"Look, I didn't major in Dishwasher Repairs."

"You majored in Engineering."

"Yeah, doesn't mean I'm a Dishwasher Engineer." 

"Why are you trying to annihilate the dishwasher again?" Jake asked, folding his arms to mirror Dirk's stance. 

"Annihilate is such a strong word."

"Dirk!"

"Dave never gave me the all clear to give my sister shit over the worst plot twist in history."

Jake raised an eyebrow and despite every urge telling him not to get even more involved in what was clearly an unwinnable battle, he shifted his arms and used the free one to point towards the roof. 

"You are nothing but a huge child and I'm sending you to your attic of filth for the rest of the evening. Try not to break any appliances on your way up."


	4. [I14]: It's AMA time, so ask away.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Dirk hosts an AMA on his website because what else has he got to do?

**di-stri.com/forums/questiontime/thread20151028**

**Rules:  
I'll skip whatever I feel like;  
Don't be a creep;  
Follow all forum-wide rules;  
Mods reserve the right to ban you for a month for rule-breaking;  
Mods are myself, [DS], and [TG].**

[GS]Di-Stri does your nephew/son/whatever rap? Lemme get at that mixtape?  
[DS]He tries. All his stuff is at whateversocialmediaiscoolrightnow/turntechGodhead.

[KR]d-stri, do you harbor any sexual interest puppet rump? if so, are you at all active in the plushrump fetish community???  
[DS]Yes, and no. My interest is based on the direct link between my own sex life vs. how many times I lose out on said sex life because I've accidentally left a puppet in the bedroom. 

[QB]when will you appreciate the glory of Paul ???  
[DS]I appreciate every one of my children equally.   
[BE]how many do u have?  
[DS]Three. Dave, Paul, and Cal. 

[LM]A/S/L?  
[DS]I'm pretty sure I have a wiki page. 42/M/CA

[CR]When are you going to pop the question?  
[DS]Which question?  
[CR]u no which!!  
[DS]No, I don't.   
[AO]I think they mean a proposal.  
[DS]No comment. 

[MW]Is your whatever interested in dating anyone ? IE: me???  
[DS]Do you mean my dick or my partner? My dick, no. It's taken. My partner, also no. He's taken. However, in the event that I drop dead, the position is open to both smokin' babes and ripped dudes. 

[AX]Would jake ever troll around or can he not use the Internet?  
[DS]It's hard to tell. Sometimes I think he's got it, then he asks me how to hotmail a newspaper. 

[CV]yo what kind of phone do you have  
[DS]iPhone 6 Plus. Silver. 64gb. 

[SS]Favorite meme?  
[DS]How am I supposed to pick just one?

[NE]Di-Stri What's the worst fight you've had with your SO?  
[DS]Four months after moving here we had an argument that ended with me taking a two-night impromptu camping trip to the backyard. The short version is that I was being an overbearing asshole and Jake didn't want to point it out so a big chunk of those four months were a kind of stalemate neither of us was willing to acknowledge. But fights happen. They're an inevitability. It's how you deal with the fallout that dictates if you can move on. 

[LK]wait is turntechGodhead your son or your nephew? im confsued.   
[DS]He's my father. Jokes aside, son.   
[CV]So why did you spend so long telling everyone he was your nephew?  
[DS]Because I didn't even tell him until relatively recently. 

[PV]influences?  
[DS]Fergie, Jim Henson, Eminem, Fergie, Spielberg.

[AS]whats your average day like?  
[DS]Wake up at four thirty, eat breakfast, drive Jake to work if he needs a lift, then go back to sleep until nine. Wake up again, reply to emails, messages, etc. that have built up since I last checked, spend a few hours on work, which for the last few months has involved a lot of writing. What I do in the afternoons depends on if I have a part-time shift that day, if Jake actually gets to leave within two hours of his shift finishing, and if I can genuinely be fucked leaving the house. 

[VR]burritos or tacos?  
[DS]Now? Neither. In 1993? Burritos.   
[SE]dude big mistake. tacos are the way to go.  
[DS]You try telling a college kid his taste in go-to fast food is wrong. 

[MN]Whats your poison?  
[DS]Beer, but when I Need A Fucking Drink, whisky. 

[UY]favourite album to work on?  
[DS]Thriller.  
[JH]what?????  
[BN]did you really work on thrillier??  
[DE]duuuuuuuuuuude  
[DS]I feel like I need to clarify: I was in Middle School in '82.

[WE]coffee?  
[DS]Black.  
[WE]like no suagr or anything  
[DS]Fuck no.

[HF]What is even UP with those shades, Di-Stri?? its like your toking up on a JOINT to get you STONED????????  
[DS]I probably was when I paid actual money for them back in the 90s. 

[AA]fave brand of shoes?  
[DS]Whatever you last saw me wearing.

[JA]Have you ever dropped acid?  
[DS]Yes.   
[RN]elbaorate!  
[DS]No. 

[UT]what was your first job?  
[DS]The neighbours used to pay me to fix their cars. It was that or get a job at Wendy's. I don't think I would have survived long in fast food. 

[IM]what do you do for a job now that youre retired??  
[DS]I live off the revenue stream I spent two decades establishing. Physical sales, digital downloads, merch, copyright payments, the list goes on. There are still things in the works. Unless I make a handful of bad investments, I'll be fine. 

[UI]where are you from?  
[DS]Syracuse, NY>Houston, TX>Upstate NY somewhere>San Diego, CA.  
[UI]upstate where??  
[DS]You think there might be a reason I'm not saying?  
[TY]give him some privacy guys!

[TP]How many people have you killed?  
[DS]None. What the fuck is wrong with you that you'd ask that?

[UT]have you ever taken any drugs  
[DS]Yes.  
[SF]What kind?  
[DS]If it was popular between '88 and '94, I probably tried it.

[RR]Did you go to college?  
[DS]Yes.   
[RR]Major?  
[DS]Engineering. 

[TF]Facebook or Twitter?  
[DS]Twitter. Less personal, more opportunity to connect with people like you.

[RH]fave album you put out?  
[DS]Prince of Heart. I've always known how the story was going to end and to finally be wrapping things up was something akin to relief.  
[OO]you said it was thriller earlier  
[TG]hes a notorious liar  
[DS]It's true. I am. 

[YY]If you didnt have to worry about money, what would you do all day?  
[DS]Probably exactly what I do all day now.

[KJ]What was your favorite activity in gym class?  
[DS]Anything that helped build and maintain both strength and stamina. 

[OJ]If you could go back in time to change one thing what would it be?  
[DS]I'm calling a pass on this question. Too personal. 

[RP]how tall are you?  
[DS]Not tall enough, if someone's recent growth spurt is anything to go by.  
[TG]????  
[DS]Yes, I'm talking about you. 

[WL]what wre you like in school??  
[DS]A nightmare. Good grades, bad attitude, mediocre attendance. They wouldn't expel me because I was on a sports team. Then they made me Captain. Go figure. 

[RT]What was your last dream about?  
[DS]Trying to pick up some things at Wholefoods. They didn't have a single fucking thing I was after so we had no unnecessarily overpriced groceries for a week. 

[OR]halloween plans??  
[DS]Buy candy, hide candy, catch Jake trying to eat said hidden candy, move candy, still have no candy left for the neighbourhood kids come Halloween. 

[UH]Who's the smartest person you know?  
[DS]My sister. She's probably less than five years off winning a Nobel Prize.  
[PR]Bullshit.  
[DS]I'd try to prove it, but you wouldn't believe me even with peer-reviewed journal links. 

[TI]did you ever steal anything?  
[DS]Almost everything I owned between ages 16 to 23. 

[JL]ever been in a fight?  
[DS]I played High School hockey, fights were a given. That aside, I was an obnoxious asshole until I hit about 21. It was inevitable. 

[ZF]Why did you never tour outside the U.S?  
[DS]Logistics. It was a combination of a, cost and effort vs. the return on said cost and effort, and b, me not wanting to be stranded on another continent should there be an emergency with my kid. Getting stuck on the other side of the country was bad enough. 

[KS]what was the best day you ever had?  
[DS]Last time McDonald's did their Monopoly giveaway, I paid for a coke and won a free coke. On the free coke, I won a sundae. 

[BB]scariest thing you've ever done?  
[DS]Moved to California.   
[DH]hahah seriously  
[KK]come to LA sometimes!!  
[LK]how is that even fucking scary?  
[RE]Dude cAlifornia is werid but not scary where are u from

[DL]what talents do you have?  
[DS]Ventriloquism. 

[QW]Are you religious?  
[DS]No. 

[DE]Do you like reality TV programs?  
[DS]Go on, quiz me on The Amazing Race.

[PO]first crush/kiss??  
[DS]Harrison Ford/A guy who I, at one point, played on a juniors team with. Obviously, while I got what I wanted out of it, he lost that round of Gay Chicken.  
[GF]how are you so open about that?  
[DS]Harrison Ford was a big deal back then.  
[GF]no, about being gay?  
[DS]Because it's important. I don't even know how I'd go about trying to hide something like that from the public, or why I'd put myself through it. For some people, it's a hard call to make. For me it wasn't. 

[MB]best and worst life decisions???  
[DS]The worst was without a doubt the haircut I gave myself in 1985. The best was risking my chances on a hookup with two kids in tow. 

[HL]whats the best and worst rumour you've heard about yourself?  
[DS]A few years back, when I was accused of putting Dave in a dangerous position because he took it upon himself to scale a lighting rig for a good photo at one of my gigs. You think I didn't tear him a new one after that? The best rumors are without a doubt the ones suggesting I have a girlfriend, fiancee, or wife, because that's an indicator someone doesn't know what Google is.

[MJ]deepest darkest secret?  
[DS]We're not even going there. 

[NH]Are u ok with being howevr old you are?  
[DS]Yes. I've done my time being me and I'm not doing it again. That said, if I hadn't done it all, I wouldn't be here. 

[GM]How many hats do you own?  
[DS]23. 

[WR]what's the biggest thing about the opposite sex you just don't understand?  
[DS]Purses. My sister is forever finding things in her purse that no one should ever just have on their person. 

[VC]whats your favourite fastfood  
[DS]In-N-Out. 

[ER]Have you ever done something heroic?  
[DS]It'll probably be what eventually kills me.

[JH]how do you look afer your hair?  
[DS]I wash it. 

[RF]What colour socks/underwear are you wearing?  
[DS]Who says I'm wearing either?  
[TG]gross

[JJ]opinions on harry potter?  
[DS]Don't even get me started on Harry fucking Potter.  
[TG]#triggered

[AD]Where do you see yourself in 10 years time?  
[DS]Hopefully, right here. 

[NE]Are you a clean or messy person?  
[DS]Infuriatingly fastidious. 

[GK]What was your favourite school subject?  
[DS]Home Economics. Where do you think Cal originated?

[RQ]how big is your tv?  
[DS]Bigger than yours.

[JN]what are the di-stri family heirlooms?  
[DS]Addictive personalities, the pursuit of irony for the sake of irony, and Lil Cal. 

[HH]What do you wear to bed?  
[DS]Who says it's anything?  
[TG]gross

[PP]average breakfast?  
[DS]A coffee, a cigarette, and something full of delicious carbohydrates.  
[PP]Yeah cause thats all so healthy nice role modeling  
[DS]It's pretty great being an adult and making all of my own decisions.   
[KE]wow total badass  
[LL]ppl still smoke??  
[DS]Do I really need to give a history lesson here?   
[ME]omg  
[AM]omgg  
[DS]I'm 43. The world was a different place when I grew up. The whole 'quit or die' thing didn't come around until later. See above response about addictive personalities for an explanation on why quitting has never stuck more than a month. 

[KE]any strage fears or phobias?  
[DS]Even if the answer was yes, you think I'd tell the internet?

[MN]Do you believe in love at first sight?  
[DS]For some people, sure. 

[NN]last time you used the phrase 'back in my day'?  
[DS]Explaining college parties to Dave. 

[YT]Have you ever fired a gun?  
[DS]Yes. I've been unsettled by just how happy Jake was about it ever since. 

[MR]What football team do you support?  
[DS]New York Rangers.   
[MR]thats not even a football team  
[DS]I know what I said. 

[AL]Have you ever had a stalker  
[DS]Probably. 

[BD]describe your worst date ever?  
[DS]All of them prior to 1991. I almost broke up with Jake in 2009 after he suggested a sixth consecutive date spent seeing Avatar. 

[RL]have you ever been in a relationships that your parents hated?  
[DS]All of them. Let's just point out they voted for Bush four times and leave it at that. 

[PO]Are you left or right handed?  
[DS]Left. 

[RE]last text you sent?  
[DS]To Jake, asking what time he thinks his shift will be over today. 

[PA]Most expensive thing you own?  
[DS]Assets like property and vehicles aside, probably Cal. He's insured for far more than what he's worth. 

[OM]pet peeves??  
[DS]Incompetence. 

[HJ]whats ur worst habbit?  
[DS]Micromanaging. That, or inevitably using all the hot water. 

[EM]whos your celebrity free pass?   
[DS]After I changed my mind for the third time, I was banned from having one at all. 

[YH]Most embarrassing moment?  
[DS]I don't do embarrassed. I do violently frustrated. 

[LK]when you were a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up?  
[DS]I wanted to invent the first fully functional AI because I thought it would be cool. The technology I needed didn't exist at the time so that was a bust. 

[RG]tattoos - how many you got an what are they?&planning more?  
[DS]Four. Leo's mask, Mermaid King, dead crow, human skull. I'll get back to you on the second part of that question sometime.

[HA]what's your zombie apocalypse plan?  
[DS]I'd like to say that I'd get my family together and before we all lost hope I'd make sure every one of us took a bullet to the brain. The reality is that I don't think I'd be able to pull it off. Sure, I'd get us all together, keep us safe and fed for a while. I could do that. But there isn't a thing in this world that could convince me to pull the trigger on any of them.

see 278 more


	5. [A5A3]: five minute warning

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which it's Halloween and new things happen.

**October, 2014**

Dave had a certain trust in people that couldn't be explained by any of the rules Karkat had learned while growing up. He had a level of loyalty to his family and friends that would have been admirable if it wasn't blind to faults, and he had a hundred percent success rate when it came to calling out a liar. That much Karkat could understand. He could see why Dave took a betrayal of trust so personally and so much harder than other people he knew; it made sense to him. 

What he couldn't understand were the things that came from a lifetime of not living in New York City. 

Dave left his laundry unattended in the machines. He would walk away from his things in classrooms while he went to get something to drink. Within two weeks of settling into his dorm he'd sat down and had a conversation with the security desk that ended with Karkat being allowed up to his room unattended just because he was sick of making the trip downstairs to collect him. Security did take a scan of Karkat's NYU ID but beyond that, he was free to come and go provided they didn't catch him wandering beyond the route to Dave's room alone. 

A month and a half on, Karkat still groaned internally when he made it upstairs only to find even the dorm room door unlocked, again. 

Dave had passwords on all of his electronics, but he'd been willing enough to share them. Karkat had asked as a joke one day, because he wanted to change the Spotify playlist. Dave had just given him the password to his desktop, mentioned it was the same on his laptop, and that his cell phone passcode was the first four digits of his Dad's zip code. When he'd asked why the hell Dave would voluntarily trust him with all of that information, Dave had just shrugged and said he knew he wouldn't tell anyone. 

The first time he'd sat down to use Dave's computer, Dave had walked him through what he could and couldn't touch. A window that was set to private browsing was off limits for anything beyond scrolling through. He had two of them open at any given time - one for turntechGodhead, and one for all of his fake accounts. His personal accounts were all open in regular windows and tabs, because they had nowhere near as many connections or followers. 

Karkat had managed to resist every urge to fuck with any one of Dave's social media accounts. Dave didn't care if he went through them, as long as he didn't change anything. His settings were all organised not only how he liked them, but to give him as much control over his own privacy as he could manage; a lot of Dave's information was public, whether he'd put it out there himself or had it mentioned by Dirk at some point. 

Despite his complete disregard for physical safety, Dave was at least concerned about his online security. 

It was an unnecessarily convoluted setup but it was fascinating to see how he ran and organised all of his blogs and social media accounts. Skype and Pesterchum ran continuously in the background. The Godhead window had multiple Twitter, Tumblr, and Facebook tabs open for ease of access. His regular windows were a mess of half-watched YouTube videos, wiki pages, and news articles. 

Karkat was scrolling through posts saved in the drafts folder of Dave's art blog when Skype started chiming. When he saw the familiar username flashing at him from the screen, he minimised the Chrome tab and answered the call. 

"It's me," he said quickly, before the video had even connected. 

Not that it mattered.

"Oh my God, _again_?"

"What do you mean, again?"

"I mean, the last three times I've called Dave, you've answered!"

"You say that like it's a bad thing," he pointed out. 

"It's not bad and I do kind of like you, but you're not the idiot I was expecting to talk to right now!"

"Thanks, Tez. Thanks a fucking lot."

When Terezi flashed a wicked grin at him from the screen, he felt that strange but familiar sensation in his chest he'd always attributed to the fact that she couldn't see him returning the expression. 

"Well you're not! Where is Mr. Creepy Eyeballs, anyway?"

"Bathroom. I doubt he even knows I'm here," Karkat said. 

"I still think that is a super weird thing you guys do, just so you know," she pointed out. 

"Trust me, I know."

"You don't think it's weird?"

Karkat tried to explain, once again, that he knew it was weird. Since Dave had first come up with the idea of moving Paul into his apartment, he'd known things were only going to get weird. 

If he was being entirely honest, Paul was probably the weirdest part of the equation. Everything else was just a regular kind of bullshit. It only seemed strange because for the first time in their five year friendship, they were able to carry out said bullshit in the same room. 

"Fuck you, Vantas! God dammit!" 

Karkat sighed and leant forwards to switch off the desk lamp before Dave could launch into another round of histrionics. 

"Put your fucking junk away," he said, without risking a glance in Dave's direction. He flicked the light switch and the room returned to its state of permanent near-darkness. 

"Dude, I heard you come in. My junk is safely stowed," Dave said, still obviously annoyed by the lamp. 

"You heard me get here and didn't say anything?"

"What did you want me to do, shout out that I was taking a shit then update you on my shower progress?"

"You definitely should have done that, Dave," Terezi said, interrupting their conversation before Karkat could forget she was there. 

"Gross," he said, rummaging through a drawer to find a shirt. "Sup, Rez?" 

"Nothing that Karkat needs to worry his pretty little head about so I'll talk to you later!"

"How would you know what his head even looks like?" Dave asked. He was standing behind the desk chair then, using the small Skype display of his reflection to fix his hair. 

"I don't, but I'm sure it's okay. No one's ever run away from him screaming so obviously he's not disgusting."

"Maybe he's so fuck ugly no one ever said anything because it'd seem hella offensive to point that shit out?"

"Oh my God!" Terezi exclaimed, collapsing into a fit of laughter. "I never even thought about that!"

"There you go, the votes are in and Karkat is officially fuck ugly," Dave said. Satisfied with his hair, he went back into the bathroom to brush his teeth. "So what's with the call?"

"I have a problem that is by proxy also your problem," Terezi said more seriously, once she managed to compose herself. 

Dave watched, from the doorway of his bathroom, as Karkat waved at the screen to try and judge just how bad a vision day Terezi was actually having. She squinted a little, then leant closer to her monitor, but she didn't wave back. 

"Not this shit again," Dave said, though a mouthful of toothpaste. Karkat repeated what he'd said to compensate for the toothpaste and distance from the microphone. 

"The exact same shit, Dave. We are back to the start on this huge pile of waste so do what you need to do to fix it!" Terezi said. "Tula says we have to go. She's making me go outside like the awful, awful sister she is."

"I'll do what I can. See you later."

"Bye, Karkat."

"I'll call you tomorrow," he mumbled.

"I know. Bye!" Terezi said. 

They caught a glimpse of Latula as she leant in to hang up the call for her sister. She winked at them before Skype disconnected.

"So what was that pile of cryptic horseshit about?" Karkat asked, turning around in the desk chair. 

"Vriska fucking Serket."

" _Again?_ "

"What do you mean again? That hasn't stopped being a huge pile of horseshit since it started. I even got mom in to try and limit the collateral damage from what will inevitably a huge fallout of bullshit, but no. No one fucking listens," Dave said. He slipped his phone into one pocket and his wallet into another, then picked up his keys. "You coming or what?"

"Lock your fucking door," Karkat snapped as he stood up.

Dave just put his hands up in surrender and made a big show of locking the fucking door.

+++

"John! Are you even listening to me?"

"No, because you lied and said you finish at seven when you really finish at nine!"

"I didn't _lie_ , John! I just didn't know until I got here. It's not even my fault, someone decided to crash their car on the way here so I have to stay another two hours because I have the worst luck in the world!"

John was starting to think that maybe Dave had a point. 

Six weeks earlier and two into the semester, everyone had been surprised to find out that Vriska Serket had kept her mouth shut for months and managed not to tell a single one of her friends that she had been accepted to the University of Washington. 

She wanted a change, she said. She wanted to get as far away from her hometown near the southern tip of Florida as she could because it was awful and boring and nothing ever happened unless she went out of her way to make things exciting. She didn't even like her friends back home. 

Dave was convinced she'd been kicked out of Florida because she was a huge bitch.

"People don't crash their cars on purpose," he said. 

"That's not the point!"

"You have a customer."

"She's not my problem, I'm bussing tables," Vriska said, waving a hand and letting it fall down over the back of her chair. "So, what's the plan?"

"What plan?"

"Oh my God, John! It's Friday!"

"Oh, that plan," John said. He put his phone down on the edge of the table after replying to a Snapchat from Karkat. "Yeah, the plan is still me going home to Dad's for the weekend. He's gonna drive me back on Monday."

"John, that is probably the most boring fucking plan yet. This is why you're not allowed to make the plans."

"I still don't get why we need a plan?"

"Because good plans make for good times," Vriska said, shifting in her chair again to lean forward with her elbows on the edge of the table. "Terrible and boring plans like yours are for losers."

"You are a loser," he pointed out. 

"I'd be offended by that if I didn't know you were just so, so wrong."

"What? Look," John said. "Can I just get Dad to come and pick me up instead of sitting around in this stupid Starbucks for another two hours?"

"I said I'd drive you though."

"Yeah, but that was before you knew you'd be stuck here until nine!"

"Fine, call your Dad. I've got a customer," Vriska snapped, standing up fast enough that her chair almost fell over. She kicked it back under the table and John watched as she stormed back behind the counter without any of the dirty mugs she'd piled on his table earlier. 

He pushed the dishes to one side and took a photo of Vriska serving the girl who was obviously not impressed with how long she'd had to wait. He sent it to her on Snapchat, and to Dave as well, captioned with _rare sighting of vriska doing her job_ , before closing the app to make a phone call. 

His dad didn't sound too impressed by the request for him to drive back into the city, especially since he'd only been home for an hour. He was a little put out when Dad asked him why he needed a lift because saying that Vriska was unreliable would only make her look bad and he didn't want to do that. Instead, he said his bus had been cancelled and he was sick of waiting around for the next one. 

When his dad said he wouldn't freeze to death on the sidewalk, he knew the battle was over. He sighed dramatically for effect, then hung up after mentioning he wouldn't be home until almost ten in a last ditch effort to change Dad's mind. 

It took Vriska another twenty minutes to come back and collect the dishes she had abandoned earlier, but she replaced them with a hot chocolate and something like an apologetic smile. 

"Let me drive though," John said. 

"How many times do I have to say that I am one hundred percent licensed to drive in the dark?" Vriska asked. Once she had piled the used mugs into her tub, she sat down again. 

John watched as she slipped an elastic band from her wrist and used it to pull her mess of dirty-blonde hair up into a ponytail. When she shook her head to get her bangs out of the way, John made a point of looking everywhere but at her. 

She coughed when he blatantly looked out the window trying to avoid her gaze. 

"John!"

"I just don't think it's a good idea, okay! You're so bad at driving in daylight and I guess it's probably some kind of offensive but you're kind of blind so it's probably also not?"

"Jeez," she said, dragging out her vowels. "It doesn't count if it's only in one eye, John. Everyone knows that."

"I think it does."

"Look at it, John," she said, rocking forwards on her chair. "Look at it!"

"Gross! I don't want to look at your weird blind eye!"

"Look, John!" 

"Oh my god, stop it!" 

Vriska burst out laughing when John actively pushed his chair back from the table to try and get away from her. She stopped when he furrowed his eyebrows, refusing to move his chair back in again. 

"Fine, be like that."

"I'm not being like that," John said. "You're being kind of shitty again."

"I am not!" Vriska protested. 

John watched as her bangs fell back into her face, obscuring her left eye again. 

"You are."

"Look John, if I was being a shitty person I'd deliberately forget to invite you to this party next Friday, and then when it was over I'd be like _hey John great party right oh wait, you weren't invited_ about it!" 

She sat back in her chair with her arms folded across her chest. 

John just stared. 

"So wait, did you just invite me or was that you telling me I'm not invited?"

"Ugh, of course you're invited!"

"It's for Halloween, right?"

"Yeah."

"Can I dress up as Egon Spengler?"

"Who's going to stop you, John? Who the fuck is going to stop you?" Vriska asked. "Ugh, I guess I should go serve those guys," she added, standing up from the table. 

"Vriska? Hey, Vriska! You forgot this massive pile of dishes again!"

+++

\-- turntechGodhead [TG] began pestering ghostyTrickster [GT] at 21:48 --

TG: remember bro  
TG: just say no   
GT: to what?   
TG: everything   
GT: dave, i'm pretty sure that i've been to more parties than you.  
GT: and unlike you i have never taken so many drugs that i cried for three days.   
TG: look that was one time and it wasnt an excessive amount  
TG: its just that any amount of acid is excessive   
TG: and now were all that much wiser on the subject  
TG: but thats not what im talking about   
GT: ????????   
TG: stay the fuck away from vriska   
GT: oh my god dave!  
GT: we're just friends.   
TG: john   
TG: listen  
TG: karkats girlfriends best friend is trying to get into the pants of my best friend slash brother  
TG: because apparently im doomed to never   
TG: ever  
TG: know someone without them knowing eight other people i know  
TG: and i feel some kind of obligation to warn my best friend slash brother   
TG: that a crazy bitch from bumfuck florida wants in his pants   
GT: okay, but what if you're wrong?   
TG: ive never been wrong about anything  
TG: besides we all know that vriska couldnt keep her mouth shut for longer than two minutes  
TG: and that once she tells terezi anything theres like a thirty second buffer  
TG: before that information gets to either me or karkat   
TG: because those two are some kind of fucked up best friends who also cant work their shit out  
TG: but the short version of all this is basically just  
TG: why the fuck do you think she picked a college around the corner from your school for dorks   
GT: i have to go!   
TG: oh my god  
TG: john   
TG: dont make me tell mom  
TG: i will tattle so hard   
GT: what? this is all dumb dave. i'm not actually stupid?   
TG: i didnt say you were  
TG: i just said that vriska is a huge manipulative bitch who wants your dick  
TG: like   
GT: bye, dave!

\-- ghostyTrickster [GT] ceased being pestered by turntechGodhead [TG] at 21:57 --

"Are you really going to call your mom?"

"I'm not sure yet."

"So you're going to call her."

"Probably." Dave sighed. He closed his laptop and swapped it out for the beer he had sitting on the edge of the coffee table. 

He had fully intended on going to the Halloween party in his dorm building. That had been the plan for weeks. But the closer it got to the end of October, the more he realised that he was only planning to go because that's what he thought he was supposed to do. 

He'd been in college for not quite two months and was still trying to figure everything out. Not only was he trying to adapt to living on campus, he was struggling to adapt to city life. Everything was loud, all the time, and it wasn't just noise from the other kids on his floor. It was traffic noise, the noise of thousands of people within a single block radius, and all the little things that came with being around so many people every minute of the day. 

He'd only just started sleeping properly again. 

That had been his go-to excuse for not knowing his own name for the first month of classes. Every time one of his professors ran through attendance, they had to call for Strider at least three times before it clicked that they were talking to him. His first assignments had all been submitted with Lalonde scrawled in the corner and thrown into the unknown pile when it was time for them to be returned. The first time he actually gave his name as Dave Strider he'd collapsed laughing against the wall and had just walked out of the campus bookstore without collecting his texts. 

Despite his best intentions, Dave Strider was turning out to be even more of a weird kid from upstate than Dave Lalonde had ever been. 

"Don't even fucking think about it!" 

Dave paused with the beer halfway to his mouth. 

"Not you, idiot," Sollux said. "Close the door."

"What door?" Karkat asked. 

"You close the fucking door! Do it! You close it!" 

Wordlessly, Sollux handed his controller to Dave and got up from the couch. Karkat skidded back across the carpet so he could see down the hall, completely disregarding the fact he was in control of the in-game party in favour of keeping an eye on the situation. 

Dave took a mouthful of the cheap beer and returned the can to the coffee table. He glanced down at Karkat, eyebrow lifting over the frame of his glasses as if to ask what was going on, because he couldn't just lean over the back of the couch to look himself. 

Karkat just shook his head and shuffled forwards again. 

"Go find something to do in your room," they heard Sollux say, as he walked past with Mituna in tow. 

"Why don't you? You're a fucking asshole, you fucking fuck of a fuckster!" 

"Yeah, did someone learn a new word?" 

"No! That's what you are."

"Cool. You're too old for trick-or-treating, play some Tony Hawk instead," Sollux said. 

"I'm not to old, you're too old. I've got some good tricks. Really good tricks. Sick board flips and shit, too. I'm better than your friends at Tony Hawk. I'm gonna play it in my room so you can't play it in the living room!" 

Neither Dave or Karkat heard Sollux's response to that. They just unpaused their game of Super Smash Bros. Brawl and within ten seconds, Dave was out. He tossed the Wii controller back to Sollux. 

"Dude, you suck," Karkat said. "What the fuck kind of an attempt was that?"

"I can't do shit with Kirby," Dave snapped. "Maybe if someone hadn't thrown me in for a round with a character I'd never pick I would have kicked your ass into next week." 

"You just suck," Sollux said, ending the argument before it could really start.

"So what was that about?" Karkat asked. 

"He keeps trying to join groups of trick or treaters."

"Huh," Dave said. "Gotta make a call," he added, getting up from his place on the couch. "Can I use your room?"

"My room is bugged by the government," Sollux said flatly. 

"You know," Dave paused long enough to take another mouthful of his beer. "If anyone else said that, I'd call more bullshit than an organic farm uses in a month."

"It's not bullshit."

"I know, that's what I just. Whatever, I'll be back," he said, taking the can with him into the hallway outside the Captors' apartment. He slipped his phone from his pocket and dialled a number while knocking back the last of his beer. 

"Dave."

"Call your bitch off, Rez," Dave said, without acknowledging Terezi's obvious disdain over his call. He put the empty can down against the wall.

"I have no idea what you're talking about," Terezi said.

"You know exactly what I'm talking about, Pyrope. I just talked to John and if he hadn't brought up the whole bad trip shit I would have guessed I was talking to her."

"Are you talking about the time you failed that rad double kick flip or the time you took all that acid at that party?"

"What? How do you even. No, shut up. Look, just call her off, Terezi. You know what she's like and you know what John's like. Whatever she says, he'll do because he's convinced that all his friends have great ideas. Like I think he's scared of crushing anyone's feelings or some shit like that? But that's what he does, he goes along with things because he's too fucking nice for his own good. You know it, I know it, and fucking Vriska knows it."

"What's your problem, Dave?"

"Don't turn this shit on me, Rez, don't you fucking dare."

"I'm not turning anything on you, you idiot! I just don't think it's a completely terrible thing like you do!" Terezi exclaimed. "And it would be nice if we could maybe talk about my best friend just once without you insisting that she is an awful person!"

"You called me last week and said we had a problem!"

"The problem was that John was still being a moron and not giving her an answer either way!"

"I thought you meant that she was serious about it was the problem!"

"What? No, the problem was that they're both being dumb and you needed to tell John he was being dumb!"

"Why would I do that? That'd be a shit time for John considering the only reason they never threw her in Juvie was because no one could prove she was completely responsible for paralysing that kid!"

"That was an accident!"

"Fuck!" Dave shouted. He pounded the wall with the side of his fist in frustration, because the conversation had definitely circled around to him being the asshole. "Fine. Don't tell her to back off. But if she turns and starts pulling the same kind of shit on John that she used to pull back home, it'll be on your conscience."

Before Terezi could get another word in, he disconnected the call. 

He just stood in the hallway, silently fuming, while the sounds of children racing up and down the stairs slowly grew more and more agitating. He gave the wall a final kick with the outside of his foot then shoved his phone back into his hoodie pocket. The empty beer can he'd left by the door crushed easily under his heel when he flattened it, partially for space in the recycling but mostly because it was a productive method of destruction. 

"What?" Dave snapped, when he noticed that Karkat had been watching his every move since returning to Sollux's living room. "You, of all people, are gonna try telling me not to get involved? If some asshole was playing me like that, you'd be so far up my ass about it we could share a fucking toothbrush."

Karkat didn't acknowledge the snide comment. He just kept watching as Dave knocked back two Tylenol, making a mental note not to ask him about the phone call for at least a few days.

+++

"You know that's probably the most depressing face I've ever seen, right?"

John looked up from his phone, scowling, when Vriska dropped into the empty place beside him on the couch. He rushed to put his cell away when she started waving the unopened beer can in front of his face, eventually snatching it out of her hand before she could press the cold aluminium to his face.

"Dave's being an asshole again."

"And no one was surprised," Vriska declared as she let herself sink back into the cushions. 

"He's probably just getting a headache. I mean, he's hanging out with Karkat and Sollux -"

"The ultimate loser squad for losers."

"- and they've been playing Smash for like three hours now and that's all TV screens and flashing lights."

"So he's being an asshole and you're defending him?"

"I guess."

"Wow, pushover much?"

"Don't be dumb. I think I know when my best bro is being an asshole for a reason, even when his reasons are so totally wrong," John said. He popped the tab on his can and took a hesitant sip, leaning forwards to rest the beer on the coffee table. "Where did you get that beer, anyway?"

"I found it," Vriska shrugged, chugging a mouthful from her own can. "And you can't blame me for just taking it. I mean, what kind of sucker leaves beer in the fridge and expects it to be there when they get back?"

"Probably most people," he laughed. "Like, it's normal to think that things will always be where you leave them."

"Whatever. So how long do you want to stay?"

"Well I got here on a bus so I should probably get the bus back," John pointed out. "Hey," he said, taking another small sip of beer. "What are you dressed up as anyway? I was gonna ask before but I thought I should try to figure it out or like, let someone else ask, but all I can figure out is that you're some kind of orange fairy thing." 

"John!" Vriska gasped. "How did you guess? It's such an obscure costume but I was hoping you'd know that I was dressed as an orange fairy thing!"

"Wow, that was mean," he said, leaning back into the corner of the couch.

"Oh please, I was just joking."

"So who are you dressed up as for real?"

"An orange fairy thing."

"Vriska!" 

"John!" 

"What do you mean 'John!', you're the one being annoying!"

"I'm not trying to be!" Vriska exclaimed. She laughed as John's demeanor suddenly switched again, this time for the better, as he bounced up to his feet so he could sit back down cross-legged on the couch, facing her. 

"Well, you are," he said. 

"All I said was that you got a lucky break there, mister. Which means you probably stole all my luck and now I have to spend the rest of Halloween having the worst luck in the world. Thanks, John, thanks a lot."

"You're welcome," he smiled. "Beer is really gross, by the way," he added, returning the can to the coffee table for what he hoped was the last time. 

"Yeah, I guess. You just have to get through the first few and then you don't really care about how shitty or warm it is," Vriska shrugged.

"Because you'd know."

"John, I grew up on the outskirts of civilisation in a shitty town with more trailer parks than people. I had a lot of time to perfect the art of pretending to like shitty beer."

"I thought your mom had a good job?"

"She's in imports, yeah," she explained flippantly. "That's why we lived in the middle of fucking nowhere."

"That sounds dumb."

"It's really not. Look, whatever. What do you think of this super lame party?"

"That it's kind of cool, actually."

"Ugh, of course you'd think it was cool, you're a dork."

"You're here too, so that makes you a dork as well," John pointed out, resting his elbows on his knees. "It's your logic!"

"Logic is dumb. Who needs it? Not me, that's for sure. You don't need logic when you've got luck, John," Vriska explained, shifting on the couch to mirror John's position.

"Lies," he said, trying to look serious.

She just stared him down until, almost a full minute later, he burst out laughing.

Then she kissed him. 

"Oh, gross!" John exclaimed, still laughing as he wiped his face with the back of his hand. "Why do you never give me any warning when you're about to do that?"

"This entire conversation has been your warning."

"Really?"

"Yeah."

"My bad. Can you maybe make it clearer or something? It's super weird when I'm not expecting it," John explained. "Like it's not bad! It's just, yeah."

"What do you want me to do, give you like a five minute warning or something?" Vriska asked, with only a hint of bitterness in her question. 

"Yeah, that's a great idea!"

"I was joking."

"Oh. I wasn't?"

"Fine," Vriska sighed. "In five minutes, I'm going to kiss you."

"It doesn't work it you tell me after it happens," John said. He took his phone back out and scrolled down through Facebook. There was nothing new to look at so he flipped over to Snapchat, checking for any photos that had come through in case the app had decided to stop giving him alerts again. When he saw there were none, he locked the screen and put the cell face down on his knee. 

"No, that's a new warning. We need to test this system in case it doesn't work, after all," she said. 

John watched her carefully as she shifted slightly closer.

"Oh. Oh, okay. Are you really going to just sit right there for five whole minutes?"

"That's what I said."

"Well, I uh, I think that you sitting right there for five whole minutes is going to be super awkward for everyone," John said, glancing down at his phone again for something to do. "So maybe, just now I mean because I guess I can count the other kiss as a warning for the next imminent kiss, maybe we can just skip the five minutes now because I'm already expecting it and you can start telling me like next week or something?"

"Yeah, I'm not going to lie, I was only half listening to all that. We're skipping the five minutes, right?"

"Yeah, but," John started, leaning back a little as Vriska leaned in. "I mean it about the warnings okay?"

"Yeah," she agreed, before she kissed him again. 

Even though he knew what was coming, John found it difficult to really focus on what was happening. He was more concerned by the fact that someone was playing music so loudly that it was distorted beyond the point of him even knowing what it was supposed to sound like. He didn't know what time it was, either, and suddenly it seemed important to know. Someone was walking past the couch and all he could think about was them accidentally knocking over the beer he'd left unattended on the coffee table. 

He lifted a hand to rest against Vriska's cheek, then used it to keep her still as he pulled back out of the kiss. 

"Thanks," he said. He gently patted her cheek before he let his hand fall back to its place resting on his own knee. "What time is it?"

"Really, John?"

"Yeah, I have no idea what time it is."

"Like eleven or something."

"Hey, you're close! It's exactly eight minutes past," he said. "Huh, I guess that means I should probably go or I'll miss the last bus and that'll be a whole thing to deal with."

"Fine," Vriska sighed, dragging out the word for dramatic effect. "I'll just stay here by myself and be bored because this is just another lame party."

"You live like one floor up, you could just go to bed."

"That's an awesome idea John, the absolute best idea I've heard all night!"

"It was just an idea, jeez," he said. "Hey, do I have your weird lipstick on my face?"

As she watched him try to wipe the blue marks from his mouth, she realised that not even she had the heart to let him leave looking like that. She swatted his hand away and took it in her own, then lead him to the nearby kitchenette so he could wash it all away.

+++

"What did I miss?"

"Nothing."

"Bollocks. What did I miss?"

"You didn't miss anything that was crucial to the plot."

"So I missed the pivotal moment, obviously."

Dirk just stared as if Jake had suddenly lost his mind. 

The previous October, Dirk had discovered that Halloween worked a little differently in San Diego than it did back in Rainbow Falls. 

He'd never really had to worry about trick or treaters before. Every year he and Roxy bought bags of Halloween candy to share with the kids because the nearest neighbour lived literally over a mile away. They would get the candy out after dinner and work their way through the bag, while they all watched the scariest movie the kids could handle.

When Dirk had returned from the grocery store with two bags of assorted candy, Jake had needed to explain how things worked. There would be more kids than they could plan for. Six bags would probably be ideal, perhaps seven, depending on the varieties. The kids would start ringing the doorbell anywhere between five and six and probably come through until almost ten. Little kids got one treat, and the older kids got a bonus for having a great costume. Teenagers were to be treated on a case-by-case basis. 

Of course, there had to be a continual series of horror movies playing in the living room, with the volume up just enough for the screams to be heard easily from the front porch. 

"You just watch the movie, I'll man the door," Dirk said. 

He stood up as the doorbell rang again, leaving Jake to turn the TV up a little in anticipation for the next scene. He opened the door to find a small group of kids bouncing up and down, waving baskets expectantly. He let the kids grab their own miniature candy bars and tossed a full sized Hershey's to the teenage girl who had obviously been forced to tag along. 

The doorbell rang every few minutes until well after eight. The flow of trick-or-treaters stemmed after that, until it was mostly fourteen and fifteen year olds stopping by. Dirk awarded the ones in costumes with candy, and told the ones in hoodies and masks to try harder next year. At one point, a teenage boy congratulated him on his Di-Stri costume and as hard as he'd tried to laugh it off, he couldn't let the kid leave without pointing out that it was just his real face. 

He even ducked back inside to pick up Cal for the photo. 

"Give it another five minutes then just turn the porch light off," Jake said through a yawn. "I'm just glad I don't have to go in tomorrow." 

"You planned it that way, didn't you?" 

"No."

"Yes," Dirk said, draining the last half a mouthful of his beer. He put the bottle down on the kitchen counter so that he'd remember to put it in recycling in the morning. "You heading to bed?"

"I think so. It's what, ten?"

"Yeah, just after." 

"Alright. Are you coming?"

"I'll be in soon, yeah. Just let me finish stacking the dishwasher first."

"Okay," Jake said. He pressed a kiss to Dirk's jaw and handed over his empty mug. "Don't forget to turn that blasted light off or the kids will just keep knocking."

"Aye, aye, Captain," Dirk said, turning around to finish the last few dishes by hand as Jake walked out of the kitchen. 

The doorbell rang just as he put the final glass into the top rack of the dishwasher. He closed the machine, set it to run, then ducked back out into the hallway. 

It was a group for four kids, who looked as if they were in the eighth or ninth grade. Their costumes were hit and miss but Dirk was impressed enough by their dedication that he threw each of them three snack sized candy bars to add to their collections. 

"Oh, shit," he said, as he dropped the last miniature bag of m&m's into a waiting bucket. "You've got Reese's in there?"

"Yeah, we got some cups down the block," the kid replied. 

"Look," Dirk said, glancing back over his shoulder - the bathroom light was still on. "I've got three full sized Twix and a Kit Kat left. They're all yours for one cup."

"Seriously?"

"Yeah. Deal?"

"Totally," the kid laughed. "It's a weird trade if you ask me," he said. Dirk threw each of the kids a full-sized candy bar and took the single Reese's in exchange, unwrapping it and shoving it into his mouth in the doorway. 

"What's a weird trade?" 

"Fuck," Dirk swore, passing the girl nearest to him the empty candy wrapper. "We're just talking shit," he said, trying not to sound like he had a mouth full of chocolate. 

"Thanks for the Twix's!" 

"Dirk," Jake warned. "What in the blazes is going on?" 

"He traded us, full size Twix's for a Reese's cup," one of the kids said, looking around Dirk and down the hallway at Jake. 

"So you kids are telling me he's got a mouthful of peanut butter?"

"Yeah."

"Right. Off with you lot," Jake said, not moving from his place outside the bathroom door. "Close that darn door but don't even think about moving," he added. "Happy Halloween, kids." 

The kids absconded. 

Dirk closed the door.

"So, funny story," he started. 

"We were having such a nice night but you've gone and bloody well fucked that up, haven't you?"

+++

"Dave?"

An hour earlier both Dave and Karkat had been given a choice: leave, or stay until the morning. Just before two o'clock, Sollux had announced that they had two minutes until he put a padlock on the inside of the door, to keep Mituna in through the night.

It wasn't any kind of torture, he had explained with an eye roll in response to Dave's horrified face. If Mituna got out in the middle of the night, he'd leave the building, pull some kind of stunt that got him arrested, and they'd never be able to get him back out of the system. Locking him in the house at night was the only way to be entirely sure he'd still be there in the morning. 

It was far too complicated to explain the whole story. Even Karkat only knew certain parts of it because the actual reasoning behind most of Sollux's dad's decisions was obscured behind both military law and non-disclosure agreements. The short version, according to Sollux, was that he only had so many options between the son with brain damage and the one who wasn't allowed to set foot on military property. Padlocking the door at night was the easiest and most effective. 

Dave had said that he didn't care either way, leaving Karkat to make a decision for the both of them. The fact that he'd just shrugged was progress in itself, because a month earlier he would have made a huge deal over being given an option that involved being outside in the city after dark. The shrug was enough for Karkat to know that if he said they were going to leave, he wouldn't be able to go straight home. He'd be forced to get the subway or a cab back downtown with Dave, forced to make sure he got inside, then forced into an argument over the fact that he knew he'd get back home again without taking a shank to the kidney. 

Sollux never slept for more than four hours at a time anyway. 

"Sleeping," Dave muttered from the floor. 

"Bullshit."

"Not bullshit."

"Lalonde."

"Shh, don't tell anyone my real name, that's how they steal my powers," he mumbled, begrudgingly rolling onto his back. 

"What fucking memo did I miss this week because all of a sudden, you assholes are playing some fucked up teen-drama game of cat and mouse," Karkat said. 

If he'd been more interested in starting a proper argument, Dave would have pointed out that Karkat's attempt at yelling quietly was one of the more hilarious things he'd ever heard. Instead, he stayed quiet and just kept staring at the darkened ceiling, one arm resting on his forehead to block the stream of light that crept through the living room curtains. 

"Lalonde!"

"There was no memo!" Dave hissed in return. "All the bullshit just coincidentally happened in the same fucking week. It's not even a pile of bullshit, it's just one lone turd of a situation that just keeps getting more and more fucked up. You know what I would have appreciated back on about Tuesday? A fucking memo!"

"What the ass munching fuck is going on?" Karkat snapped. 

"Is this really a thing that we need to discuss right now?"

"It's not like you were actually sleeping or anything. I don't think you've actually slept through a whole god damn night since August!"

"Dude, it's weird that you know that. Like, let's face the fucking facts here. It's bizarre. It's probably some kind of fucked up as well because why the fuck not," Dave said. "There's no actual reason for you to know that I'm seriously lacking in the Z's department these days, just like there's no actual reason for me to give a shit about who John's supposedly not dating on the opposite side of the country but he's not just my best bro anymore, is he? He's like my fucking brother which is even weirder than you knowing my sleep habits but the bottom line is that I just straight up don't think Vriska is any kind of good news. She snuck in outta nowhere and suddenly she's all up in everyone's business and it's giving me the heebies because who the fuck does that?" 

"You done, Tolstoy?" Karkat asked. 

"No, because I managed to get through a rant about Vriska without calling her a manipulative bitch."

Dave sighed and turned his hand over so it was covering his eyes, disguising the fact that he was already back to closing them. 

"You want to take another free shot at her?"

"Who, the sneakiest bitch to ever come out of Florida?"

"And what, now you're done?"

"Now I'm done." 

"Terezi's kind of pissed at you," Karkat pointed out, falling back on the couch again once Dave had finally made his point. "That bitch is her best friend, for some reason, so she's all kinds of antsy about you getting on her case about this shit." 

"Look, I'm not on anyone's case," Dave said. "The fact is that way back me and John used to talk about all this shit on something like a weekly basis. I'm not saying that I'm sorry for never inviting you to our super secret best friends only meetings, because I'm not even remotely sorry about that, but whatever she's got him convinced into thinking is okay is not actually okay with him."

"What the hell do you mean by that?"

"I mean that he spent three weeks preparing for the first time he kissed some girl at camp, he's going to need like three _years_ advance notice on anything more than that or he'll fly off the fucking handle and into the night and then it'll be R.I.P. in fucking pieces, John Egbert, death by potential cootie infestation." 

"Please tell me you're exaggerating with the cooties thing."

"I don't know, replace cooties with anything to do with the crotchal region and you're probably close. But whatever, you know? That's his business, and I sure as hell wouldn't want him blabbing about all my personal fucking business to a third party, so end of story. I'm just playing the role of the very concerned older brother who knows more about John than Vriska will probably ever take the time to ask about."

"He's seven months older than you."

"I know that," Dave snapped. "It's meta-fuckin'-phorical. Are we done gossiping like fourteen year old girls now? You got your answer, I got an extra ten minutes for my Tylenol to kick in, everyone's a fucking winner."

Karkat opened his mouth to give a snarky response, but something about the tone Dave was using made him stop and reconsider. 

If nothing else, it was blatantly obvious that the entire conversation had gone down the way it had because Dave was tired, annoyed, and in pain. He'd pushed just enough limits to get the information he needed; Dave would be pissed at him for a few days, sure, but with more of the story falling to place every time he brought it up, things were starting to make sense.

Both Terezi and Dave were freaking out over the so-called relationship between their respective friends. Their concern was grounded in the belief that they were looking out for and protecting Vriska and John from each other, but somewhere along the way they'd both started assuming they were on the same side of the argument. In reality, however, they were fighting for completely different armies. 

And now, with what Dave had let slip under the influence of probably half a beer too many for someone as scrawny as him, Karkat was almost entirely prepared to abandon ship and risk being called a traitor by Terezi. 

That was a wrath he never wanted to face. 

By the time he'd figured out what to say next, Dave was already cocooned under his pile of floor blankets. There was a very faint glow beside his head that indicated he'd pulled his phone out, so Karkat took that as a definite sign their conversation was over.

+++

\-- turntechGodhead [TG] began pestering timaeusTestified [TT] at 02:43 --

TG: hey  
TT: Hey.  
TT: How was your first college Halloween?  
TG: played smash drank beer fought with terezi fought with karkat  
TG: you  
TT: I traded full size candy with teenagers in exchange for a single Reece's Peanut Butter Cup and got sent to my room.  
TG: for making a terrible trade  
TT: For bad judgement.  
TG: yeah those teens will be all over the news tomorrow  
TG: local weirdo revealed to be ex rapper  
TT: More because I'm a ticking time bomb with peanut butter in my system.  
TG: scratch that  
TG: ex rapper revealed to be local weirdo  
TG: catchier  
TT: That's definitely what I'm after, a catchy headline in the local paper.   
TG: i wont even ask for royalties on that one  
TT: You all good though? You said something about fights in there and tried to hide it.  
TG: all good  
TG: you  
TT: I'm not allowed to so much as sweat in his vicinity until tomorrow night.  
TG: nasty  
TT: Happy Halloween.  
TG: yeah you too  
TG: can i go now  
TT: You hit me up first. You sure all is good?  
TG: yeah i was just trying to get out of this without a gee thanks dad i hope you have a swell halloween   
TT: Well, son, I sure did!

\-- turntechGodhead [TG] ceased pestering timaeusTestified [TT] at 02:48 --


	6. [A5A4]: he talks a lot of shit

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which nothing good ever happens after midnight.

**November, 2014**

John Egbert had never developed a good sense of time. Some days, the hours would drag and feel like weeks, while on others the minutes flowed at almost double their usual pace. He'd always relied on external cues to drag him back into the real world from where his mind had been; bells between classes in school, certain doors closing when Dad got home, alarms set to remind him that it had been two hours since he'd sat down to study. 

He could never remember what half an hour was supposed to feel like. 

His dad had given him a new watch on his first day of college, because all good men needed good watches. It wasn't anything too fancy, but it sat comfortably on his wrist and ticked quietly enough that it was never a distraction when he took it off and propped it on top of a piano to keep track of the passing hours. 

Even though he'd lived his entire life less than an hour from downtown Seattle in good traffic, Dad had insisted that he spend some time living on campus. When the only solid argument he'd been able to think of against the move was the money, his dad had sat him down to work out the cost difference between him living in town, and buying and maintaining a second car. 

When Dad turned out not only to be right, but right by at least two thousand dollars, John had quickly moved on to negotiating when he was allowed to come home. Two weekends a month, not counting finals, plus two free passes to just show up on any other night of the week throughout the semester. It was fair, plus John was able to keep everything in his bedroom and only had to take the things he desperately needed over to campus. 

With headphones clamped firmly over his ears, they were at least warm in the sharp afternoon wind. The breeze danced through his hair and whipped it back and forth, while his fingers tapped out one of his assessment pieces on the bench beside him. It was hard with gloves on, but harder again because the Ed Sheeran in his ears didn't quite match the tempo of what his hands were trying to do. He frowned when he missed an imaginary key and gave up his practice in favour of glancing at his phone notifications. None of them were important, luckily, because he'd have to take his gloves off to unlock the screen. He returned his cell to his jacket pocket and waited. 

A few minutes later - five, perhaps - he beamed when a taxi pulled up in front of him. His gloved fingers fumbled with the iPod from his other pocket, thankful it was a classic with the mostly physical buttons. He paused his playlist and flicked the lock switch on top of the device, dragging his headphones down around his neck just as the rear passengers' door of the vehicle opened. 

"Heya, Johnny."

"Hi!" 

"So what, you've just been waiting outside since I texted you?"

"Uh, yeah," John admitted, sheepishly. He was already on his feet by then, but he reached down to pick up his backpack. "Not the whole time, maybe just fifteen minutes?"

Roxy threw an arm around John's shoulders and pressed a loud kiss to his temple. He let her wind her own coat-covered arm through his, even though she'd been dropped right outside the bagel place he'd been wanting to go to all day. 

"You ever stop and think it might be cold out here?"

"Yeah, but I planned for that," he said, disentangling his arm from hers to pull at his collar. "See, extra shirt, hoodie, coat. You're not even wearing real winter shoes!"

Roxy pulled open the door to the Einstein Bros. and stared at John as if they'd only just met for the first time. 

"Johnny, the classier I look when I fly, the more likely I am to get a free upgrade. Besides, it's not even snowing here," she added, ducking into the store behind him with her heels clicking across the tiled floor. 

It had only been a few weeks since he'd last seen Roxy, but it felt like too many things had happened since then. He had a lot of irons in the fire, lately, and it was getting hard to keep track of them all. He tried to tell her everything but by the time she was halfway through her coffee, he realised that he'd been talking mostly about his lessons.

"Whoops, sorry," he said, finally taking a bite of the toasted ham and swiss in his left hand. 

"For what?" Roxy asked, her question accompanied by a smile. 

"I've been crapping on about one class for like an hour," he said, this time through a mouthful of bagel. 

"It's only been ten minutes since we sat down."

"Really? Wow."

"I got a surprise for you," she said, still smiling.

"Cool! Wait, what's the catch?"

"The catch is no telling anyone until I give you the all clear. Still interested?" Roxy asked.

"You think I'd blab and ruin what is obviously one of the coolest secrets ever? No way, my lips are sealed so tight. No secret surprises shall pass," John said. He bounced up a little in his armchair to sit cross-legged before taking another large bite of his bagel. "Okay, ready."

"I spent over three thousand dollars today."

"What! Did you just buy those shoes or something?"

"Very funny, Mister. Better."

"Do you want me to keep guessing?"

"You might as well," Roxy said, her smile still firmly in place. "Two more."

"New car?"

"That'd be a pretty shitty car."

"Dinner with Ian McKellen?"

"Sir Ian to you, but no," she corrected. "Guess who's coming to Washington-"

"Oh my God!"

"-for Christmas."

"Oh my God! You're spending Christmas _here_?" John practically screeched. "Here? Like, at our _house_?"

"Yeah, I'll be here for Christmas," Roxy said, shaking her head with laughter at John's reaction. "But think, Johnny. Why'd it cost me so much?"

"Because it's Christmas? Unless," he trailed off, his expression moving from excitement to shock. "No way. No _fucking_ way!"

"What's your final answer, Mr. Egbert? We gotta lock in your answer before we can give you the million bucks."

"Dave's coming? _Dave_ is coming _here_ for _Christmas_?" 

"I'm coming for Christmas and I'm bringing both my babies with me," Roxy confirmed. "No telling either of them until I say!" She added quickly. 

He made a lip-zipping motion and threw an imaginary key over his shoulder. 

"Do they know?"

"I haven't been able to get Rosie on the phone all day, and Dirk wanted to tell Dave since the implications for them are a whole lot bigger, but we don't need to worry about any of that."

"Dad knows, right?" John asked.

He was grinning from ear to ear, almost hovering in his chair from the excitement. 

"Yeah, he knows. We so-called grown-ups have been working on the logistics for a few weeks. It's all good, Johnny."

"Oh, man. Shit, this is so cool! This is my Christmas present, right? Like, I'm getting to meet my best bro in real life so that's it, right? Aw, man, he's gonna punch me in the dick."

"Christmas is a no dick-punching zone," Roxy reassured him. "So would it be an awful thing if that was your only present?"

"No way! Hey, Dad's not leaving work early today is he?"

"Not until five thirty, like always."

"Ugh, yeah. He never leaves early. You wanna go see a movie instead of just waiting around like dumbasses?" John asked. He shoved the remaining bite and a half of bagel into his mouth all at once. "I haven't seen Interstellar yet and it's been out for a whole week. It's supposed to be mostly terrible but it's a sci-fi movie with McConaughey in it so it kind of wins points back on that front."

"Sorry, but your mouthful of densely packed carbs made it hard to hear what you were saying. Something about McConaughey being terrible, right?"

"You take that back."

"Sorry, Johnny. One shalt not lie about shitty actors despite their ye olde dreamy eyes," Roxy said. 

"Wow, lame. Do you even like sci-fi movies?" John asked. It wasn't as much a question of her being a grown woman as much as it was him never having asked before.

"I'm the smartest scientist you know."

"No you're not," he laughed. "You're a, wait, what do you do?"

"Science."

"Huh," he thought, trying to remember if Dave had ever mentioned exactly what it was that his mom did for a job. "What kind of science?"

"A lot of theoretical and experimental physics, mostly. I can't tell you exactly what theories or experiments I'm working on in case we accidentally stumble across an infinite void of parallel universes and implode everything," Roxy explained, winking at John over the rim of her empty coffee cup. 

"Like, string theory and stuff?"

"Exactly like string theory and stuff, except mostly the stuff because I was already bored with superstring theory before I was even outta high school." 

"So why did Dad never let me call you for help with my science homework?"

"Can you teach me how to play the oboe?"

"What? No." 

"That's why I never helped you with your biology homework. It's all music but it's not exactly the bit you know," Roxy explained. "So are we going to see this movie or what?"

"You actually want to see it?"

"Yeah. How far to a cinema?"

"Uh, like ten minutes that way," John said, waving over his shoulder. "Do you really not want a bagel?"

"I'd rather wait ten minutes and get an entire bucket full of popcorn," Roxy said, standing to put her jacket back on. 

She had to wait for John to disentangle his own coat hood from the cord of his headphones before they could step back out into the brisk afternoon air. 

"So, real talk, Johnny. How's your girlfriend?"

John groaned and buried his face into his scarf. They were less than halfway to the cinema and had spent the last few minutes avoiding cracks in the sidewalk together, their arms linked once again. 

"She's not my girlfriend, Roxy!"

"It sure sounds like she is. What's her name again?"

"Vriska."

"Sounds like trouble. Is she trouble?"

"No?"

"What's she like?" Roxy pressed.

"Ugh, fine. She's like, she's a really big nerd and likes D&D and stuff but she can also be really kind of mean sometimes. Like she's bossy but I think that's because she just wants people to like her and she tries to make them like her instead of just letting them decide?" John explained. It sounded like a fair assessment of Vriska, to him at least. He'd never tell her all of what he'd just told Roxy. 

"Hair?"

"Blonde. But like, darker blonde than even probably Rose."

"Eyes?"

"Well the good one is blue and the blind one is gross."

"But she's not your girlfriend."

"Please stop," John whined, taking a jump step over a sidewalk crack to keep up with Roxy. 

"Have you kissed her yet?" 

"What?"

"You're gonna have to surprise me with this answer, Johnny. I'm not entirely sure which way this one is gonna go," Roxy said.

John just mashed at the crossing button while they waited for the lights to change. 

"Yes," he admitted, begrudgingly. "But just like, the normal kind. Not the movie kind."

"And by the movie kind you mean what exactly?"

"Oh my God."

"You mean the full on spit swap, right?" Roxy asked, raising an eyebrow before laughing, loudly, as John clung even more tightly to her arm and turned to hide his face against her shoulder. 

"If I say yes can we just go back to talking about how my best bro is gonna be here for Christmas?"

It took a second for Roxy to figure out what John had said, because his voice was filtering through both his scarf and her jacket sleeve.

"Ah, shit," she said, turning in to bring her other arm around and pull him into a tight hug. "Subject dropped, conversation over. Sorry, Johnny," she added, using the hand that wasn't trapped in his to gently pat his shoulder blades. 

She let go when the pedestrian lights finally changed.

"It's okay, it's not like it's embarrassing or anything. It's just,yeah, embarrassing, I guess is probably the right word," John said, shaking his head to free himself from his scarf.

"What are you talking about? I have no idea what you're talking about. I tell you that I convinced your Dad to let my kids, including your best friend in the entire world, fly in for Christmas, and you go silent," Roxy said, her tone switching to something cheerful and distracting. "Jeez, I can refund his ticket if you don't actually want to meet him."

"No! Do you think we can convince him that he has to sleep in the laundry room?" John asked, perking up when Roxy made it blatantly obvious she was listening and prepared to drop the subject.

"He's a tough one to crack, we're gonna have to plan this out right down to every possible detail."

+++

"What the dicklicking fuck are you doing?"

Dave just stared as if he was contemplating the possibility that Terezi's blindness was contagious. 

"Look I know you're about as into shit like basketball as I am and that we could argue about the non-existent differences between that and baseball for the next six months but I figured you'd have enough fucking brains to recognise a pair of running shorts when you see 'em."

"You're going out for a run?"

"Yeah, what's your problem?"

Karkat stared from his desk chair, which he'd turned around when he heard Dave rummaging through his backpack. He leant forwards and hunched over, with his feet planted firmly on the floor and elbows resting on his knees. 

He waited for Dave to stand back upright from where he was crouched to tie the laces of his sneakers. 

"You can't go for a fucking run," he said.

"You gonna stop me?"

"Pretty much?"

"I reiterate, what's your fucking problem?" Dave asked. 

While he was distracted by his iPod and scrolling through to the right playlist, Karkat darted across his bedroom to put himself between Dave and the door. 

"You can't just go for a fucking run," he snapped. 

"What? Dude, what the fuck is your fucking problem?"

"My problem is that it's two thirty in the morning, in November, in New fucking York."

"Yeah, and? Outta the way, bro. I got shit to do and places to be," Dave said, an obvious air of disgruntlement in his voice. The expression didn't show on his face. 

"Dave, what the fuck? Like I know you've always had your bullshit self-destructive streak but that's your fucking problem. You want to drive recklessly on icy roads? Be my guest. Jump out of trees into water that's either running or frozen? Go nuts. But whatever this shit you've been pulling for the last three weeks is, you need to pull your head out of your own ass and deal with it. What the hell was the thought process that went into deciding that going for a run right now was a good idea?"

It would have been a more impressive stare down if Karkat wasn't glaring daggers at a pair of sunglasses. 

"Because it's the only time I can fit it in."

"Bullshit."

Dave's face remained still behind his scuffed Aviators. 

"Because I want to try outrunning some knife crime."

"Bullshit."

"Vantas."

"Strider."

"Lalonde."

"Wrong name."

"Fuck," Dave said, with the same monotonous tone he'd adopted earlier in their conversation. "Karkat, shit. I'll be like twenty minutes."

"And it's like twenty degrees out there."

"Thirty."

"If you're lucky."

"I am."

"There's still snow on the ground."

"I'll leave the hoodie on."

"Dave, what the fuck?"

"Look, if I don't go when it's dark I don't go at all," Dave said. 

Karkat only knew that Dave had been returning the stare when he obviously looked away, turning his head to glance down at his phone. 

"What happened to using that gym near your building? That was a thing."

"Yeah, for like a week," Dave said shortly. "Too many fluorescent lights."

He mumbled the last comment, while still scrolling through his Twitter feed, but the comment on top of the behaviour was enough for Karkat to finally catch on to what he was trying not to say.

"Migraine?"

"Not right now. Obviously." 

Dave squared his shoulders, hands resting in his hoodie pockets; Karkat could tell that he had one hand wrapped around his phone and the other gripping his iPod. He was standing perfectly still, at least three paces from the door, in just his shorts and a t-shirt. Apart from his lightweight hoodie, the socks pulled halfway up his calves were the only other indication he'd even considered the temperature outside. There was no way to tell where he was looking. 

"Headache?" Karkat suggested. 

"Negative."

"So why've you been knocking back Tylenol all day?"

"Fuck off," Dave snapped, taking half a step forwards. 

"Dave!" 

"Step off my fucking dick, would you? I've got two assignments due next week, I can't fucking sleep in this god damn city anyway because it's too loud and too bright and it feels eight kinds of wrong, and I opened my fucking Christmas commissions already because last year I only just got them done in time and some people were not fucking happy with me for it so I thought nice, I'll get started early and then, _then_ , since I've gone from something like ten to twenty thousand followers since last year, I had to shut down the ask box like twenty minutes later because I'd maxed out the spots already!" 

Karkat didn't say anything when Dave's voice started to get louder the longer he ranted. He stayed quiet, hoping that his lack of input would be enough to convince Dave to go on. 

"Fuck," he said eventually, after what would have otherwise been an awkward pause. 

"Fuck is the bonafide correct response," Dave spat bitterly, his shoulders hunching forwards once again. "The amount of fucking shit I had to go through and deny because it was awful fucking garbage that no one should ever have to draw, and I'm not talking like the furry porn or anything because we all know that's a given when you open art commissions to the masses, but just utter shit that I didn't want to do, so I told them or ignored them and said I ran a number generator to pick the twenty I actually wanted to do and bullshit bullshit bullshit," he went on. 

"Uh huh," Karkat nodded, sliding down to the floor with his back pressed against the closed door, hoping that Dave would eventually mimic the action from where he was standing.

"So I get that shit sorted and then it's another like six hours a day in front of my screen which in turn is a bonus six hours in front of a blinding wall of light, and the possibility of my brain flipping its fucking shit and putting me out of action for like four days is astronomically, shittingly possible so I take a fistful of Tylenol because I might as well cut off the brain fuckery at the pass. Sleep, wake, repeat. Skip a class or two for more sleep because it sure as shit didn't come easily after those gunshots two nights back," Dave said, his hands still in his pockets. 

His weight shifted onto his left leg. 

"Yeah."

"And I mean that's all bad enough but then I get some asshole, because there's always that one fucking asshole who won't take no for an answer, and he's trying to ask me over and over why he didn't make the cut for a commission and I'm like, dude, chill, random numbers and shit better luck next year, yada yada, but he's just asking and asking for like three days from different accounts and eventually I'm all bro, let me spell it out for you real fuckin' clear here and say that there's only one guy on the face of the fucking Earth who I'll draw Lil' Cal for, and that's the guy who owns Lil' fuckin' Cal."

Another redistribution of weight, this time accompanied by arms moving to fold over a chest. 

"Mmhmm."

"Because you know how sweet it is not having to think about that shit anymore? It's really, _really_ fucking nice to wake up and not have to think about the barrage of weird puppets hidden all through your house because now they're on the other side of the fuckin' country. But that's not even the point, the point is this motherfucker kept asking and asking, and every time my fucking inbox lit up it was like shit, is that the colour that should be, or has Tumblr changed again, or maybe, just fuckin' maybe, this is some weird migraine aura shit so I better pop another pill, maybe a codeine this time, just to give my liver a break from the acetaminophen," Dave said. 

He crouched back down again, as if to fix his laces, but then shifted to stretch one leg out in front of him. The other followed, and his back settled against the side of Karkat's bed. 

Karkat stayed silent. 

"And I mean I guess we all know by now that my brain is just a clusterfuck of barely related thoughts and tangents that die off before they can split into new thoughts, or invade existing ideas, but sometimes one idea sort of worms its way in with the rest and sort of just drops in to say hi and the next thing you know my gray matter is leaking all this _bullshit_. And sometimes that bullshit is useful, like hey man check out how these colours all react at different levels of opacity, you should do more layering like that, but sometimes it's like what the fuck would you do if I decided to just shit myself right here right now, fuck where you are. Class, shower, subway, taxi, shit doesn't matter, what would you do if I threw a curveball at you and just rendered you a vomiting, pain-filled mess of a human being?"

When Dave pulled his legs up to his chest, elbows coming to rest on his knees, Karkat slowly reached above his head and flicked the dimmer switch for his ceiling light to an even lower setting.

"Better?"

"Look, the concept of a lightbulb is something so fucking awful right now that I just want to go back in time and punch Edison in his smug fucking face. Because imagine, just fucking imagine, you had one of your major inputs so fucked up that it might as well not even be a real input for at least four hours out of every day, plus however long it spends being randomly shitty, and then factor in all the other bullshit implications in that. Like sure, Rez can't see jack shit to any worthwhile degree ever, but that's at least a thing that's consistent for her, right? She wakes up knowing she can't use her eyes so she just gets the fuck on with developing some other sense to make up for it. John's vision is something like taking a photo through a fucking shower screen, underwater, with the shutter speed cranked as low as it goes, but he puts his glasses on and yeah he doubles in nerd cred but he also gets to fucking see," Dave went on, his nails digging into his scalp. 

"Yeah," Karkat nodded. 

"I get to play Russian fucking roulette every time I walk into a goddamn room. What's on the other side? A mild annoyance? An _excuse me can I go for a piss_ just to get some respite in that bathroom two floors up they haven't fixed the bulbs in yet? Or how about the classic just fuck me up for the next forty eight hours, where I get to skip two days of class every three weeks, unless I'm lucky and it's Friday afternoon so I get to spend all weekend in my shitty fucking dorm room that doesn't even have real fucking blinds over the window, how about that?"

Dave's hands slipped back from his scalp and up under the lower rims of his Aviators, pressing into the crease of his eyelids. 

"Dave," Karkat started, drawing his own knees up as if to stand.

"It's an inescapable fact of life in the modern fucking world."

"Just stay there," he added, quickly, clambering to his feet. "Like, right there,"

"And it's all fucking bullshit anyway, like hey on one hand my eyes are completely fucked up but I guess it means I've got hella levels of colour differentiation because they just absorb every particle out there," Dave went on. 

Karkat slipped out of the room; Dave was still talking. 

He crept down the hall, heart pounding but outwardly calm, before he stopped outside the door to his parents' bedroom. 

"Hey," he said, after loudly clearing his throat. "Dad."

"Hmm?"

"I need your help."

"Huh?"

"Fuck, it's like two in the morning and I fucking need your fucking help," he snapped, hissing the request through his teeth in the hopes of not also waking up his mom. 

"What's wrong?"

Karkat jerked his head in the direction of his own room, then stepped out of the doorway in what he hoped was a display of urgency. He stood with his back to the wall beside the still partially open door, listening to his dad assure his mom that everything was fine, that it can't be anything too bad or else the yelling would have been louder. 

"Dave's lost it," he said, once his father was standing in front of him. "He somehow went from trying to escape for a two a.m. run to talking more shit than Kankri on a good day. I don't know what to do."

"He's just talking?"

"Ranting. Just, incessant ranting about how he's got all this shit on and it's giving him migraine paranoia or something, it was hard to follow," Karkat explained, falling into step a few paces behind his dad. "Like he talks a lot of shit, that's an indisputable fact, but this is different." 

Karkat hung back in the doorway of his bedroom as his dad started directing questions at Dave. He didn't listen too closely to their conversation, because whatever the problem was, it was something entirely out of his control. Had he known something was off? Sure. But he'd blamed it on the first semester of college and too much caffeine, like every other kid their age. He'd been hoping that with the holidays not far off, everything would settle down by the time January rolled around. 

His dad clapped him on the shoulder as he walked out of the room, in a way that indicated he would only be gone for a few minutes. 

Dave was still sitting on the floor. He was quiet, but tapping his fingers on the carpet; he'd at least kicked off his sneakers.   
Karkat was not prepared to be the one to break the silence. 

When his dad came back and handed Dave a glass of water and two small, white pills, he scowled but still said nothing. 

It was almost half an hour later when Karkat felt his dad join him on the couch. He'd left to go and put the empty glass into the dishwasher and figured that staying out of the way was probably his safest option. He was fully prepared to hand the situation over to not only an adult, but a legal medical professional, because as involved in Dave's shit as he was, he wasn't prepared to deal with so much of his immediate and confusing emotional fallout. 

"He's asleep," his dad said, with a sigh. 

"Holy fuck."

"He talks a lot of shit."

"Yeah. What was all that?" Karkat asked. He looked over at his dad, who held out Dave's hoodie with the pockets still full of electronics. 

"Nothing life threatening. I'll get someone in the clinic to write him a referral for one of the hospital ophthalmologists, they can get a copy of his report sent through and that might help resolve whatever the main issue is, exactly."

"Neat. Thanks."

"You're welcome." 

"So, what did you tell him you gave him?"

Karkat managed a grimace when his dad laughed. He fished the iPhone out of Dave's pocket and checked the screen for any alerts; nothing important. 

"Generic codeine."

"And you actually gave him?"

"You don't need to know. I'll tell you that I gave him a full ten milligrams though." 

"Holy _shit_." 

"Come and get me if you need anything else, but if he's awake before this time tomorrow afternoon I'll be surprised," his dad said, as he stood back up. "Don't stay up too late."

"Yeah, I won't," Karkat said. He waited until he heard the door to his parents' bedroom click closed to mute the TV. 

He punched in the passcode for Dave's phone and cleared all the alerts before he did anything else; in the forty minutes or so since Dave had last looked at the screen, an unmanageable amount of notifications had built up but none of them seemed worth snooping through. He opened the phone app, found the number he was looking for, and dialled.

+++

"Dude, you better have a good excuse for this because I just got a round of multiplayer to load for the first time all week," Dirk said shortly, his phone resting on his knee. "And you know what a shitty experience it's been trying to get that to work." 

"Uh, Mr. Strider?" 

Not Dave. 

Definitely Dave's cell, definitely not Dave. 

"The fuck?"

"It's Karkat. Vantas." 

"Hey, kid. Long time, no see. What's up?" Dirk asked, throwing a grenade at a player from the opposing team, before he ducked back out of sight and ran across the map to safety. "You think Dave would want an Xbox for Christmas?"

"Probably. Is this a bad time?"

"It's only midnight, so no."

"Okay, uh. The thing is -"

"What thing?"

"Are you playing Halo?" 

"Trying to," Dirk said. He just sighed when the servers booted him from the game, again, and swapped his Xbox controller for his phone. "Well apparently not anymore, three drops in half an hour is probably a sign that I should quit while I'm ahead. So where's Dave if you've got his phone?"

"Asleep."

"Lame," Dirk laughed. "It's only three in the morning over there." 

"Well, technically, he's. Fuck, fuck you for having a good time right now." 

"Dude, what's up? Like is this a secret call to ask for some kind of serious life advice?" Dirk asked. He stood up and put the controller back in its place on top of the console, before double checking that the door into the hallway was closed. "Because we've been over this before, ask away." 

"If I wanted life advice I'd google it."

"So?"

"So Dave's asleep because I failed some kind of bullshit test of friendship and froze up when he lost his absolute shit."

"Wait, what?"

"He's okay, but that's because I didn't know what to do so I got my dad, and Dad's solution was to just knock him out with a double dose of sedatives." 

"Your dad drugged my kid?" 

" _I didn't know what else to do_." 

"Go back and start at the top, kid," Dirk said calmly, as he sat down on the edge of the coffee table. 

He could feel his stomach turning already. 

"He just lost it. He was thought it was a good idea to go run three miles right now, I called him on it, and he launched into a fifteen minute spiel that basically culminated in him talking about how he's been dropping Tylenol for a week straight so he doesn't miss any more classes between now and the end of the semester over a headache." 

There it was, the fleet of BMX riders doing backflips in his gut. 

"So he flipped, you flipped, then an adult intervened?" 

"Basically. Dad's a doctor." 

"I know. He's definitely out for the night?" 

"Yeah. I once slept for eighteen hours after a dose like that." 

"Your dad knocked you out?" 

"It was that or deal with eighteen hours of me being awake." 

"You're the one who did anger management, right?" Dirk asked. "Or was that the criminal as well?"

"That was me."

"If he wakes up, tell him I'll be there tomorrow afternoon."

"Look, that'll just piss him off."

"I think he'll be pissed enough that you doped him up," Dirk said.

"Ugh, that's not what I meant, Strider."

"Tell him I'm on my way. Two things before you go."

"Uh?"

"From where I'm sitting, you did the right thing. He'll be pissed about the doping but we both know he'll be all kinds of embarrassed over losing his cool and not being able to deal with his shit. Knocking him out was kind of a dick move, but probably the safest gamble you'll ever make."

"You're welcome, I guess?"

"And two, it's Dirk."

"What."

"Drop the bullshit. You've got my private chumhandle, you might as well use my fucking name." 

Karkat muttered a thanks and one more sorry for what was probably good measure before   
Dirk hung up on him. 

He wasn't angry. He couldn't find it in himself to be angry. He was annoyed with himself for not realising something was wrong sooner, frustrated because he was so far away, and exhausted by the thought of having to go and sort everything out. 

He already had tickets to fly to New York in less than three weeks.

That was a kick in the guts, because it was so easy to forget Dave was still only seventeen. His December birthday meant he'd started school before he turned five, so he wasn't set to be eighteen until most of the way through his first semester of college. Rose had been the same. He was seventeen, alone, and making not only a college transition but a dramatic lifestyle change.

Him crashing this hard was never a matter of if, it was when. 

Dirk turned off the TV, the living room light, and the hall lamp on his way across to the bedroom. He threw his shirt into the laundry basket and just sat on top of the covers, idly running his fingers through Jake's hair. 

He could hear the ticking of the antique clock in the dining room.

Seconds, minutes. 

Half an hour.

Jake's knuckles tapping against the outside of his thigh.

"Are you going to sit up all night?"

"I like watching you sleep."

"Malarkey," Jake scoffed, quietly. "What's got your stomach in knots this time?"

Seconds, minutes. 

"I forgot to do something," Dirk said, sliding back off the bed. "I'll be back soon."

"Company?"

"No, just go back to sleep."

Minutes, hours. 

Jake's knuckles again, this time stroking along his jaw. 

"Better?"

"Sure."

"Did you have a shower?"

"I had to wash the engine oil off," Dirk said. He turned, resting his head in the crook of Jake's neck. One arm under the other pillow, one across Jake's stomach.

"Engine oil?"

"Oil change on the truck. Replaced a few spark plugs. Checked everything else under the hood while I was there."

"You absolutely had to do that at two in the morning?"

"Not quite two yet."

"Don't tell me you're fretting about Christmas already," Jake mumbled tiredly. 

"I don't fret."

"Lies."

"If we go to sleep now we can get a full eight hours for a change," Dirk said, running the fingers of his left hand along Jake's side. "Imagine that."

"You're in a state conducive to sleep?"

"Moreso than I was an hour ago."

"What's wrong?"

"I have to go to New York tomorrow," Dirk said, after another long pause. "Hopefully just for the weekend." 

Jake sighed. He knew that if it was something bad enough, Dirk would explain in the morning. 

"Night," he said quietly. 

Dirk didn't respond; he just let out a near imperceptible sigh of his own and closed his eyes. 

The BMX brigade was still going strong.

+++

It wasn't like waking up from his regular dose of painkillers. It was an arduous process, where the waking world slowly started to seep into his dreams and he could only focus on one new piece of information at a time. 

It was dark. Still or again, he didn't know. There was food. Something spicy. An itchy but warm woollen blanket pulled up to his shoulders. He tried opening his eyes a second time but failed. Voices, some more familiar than others. A smell that was so familiar yet he couldn't place it. Fingers brushing the hair back and away from his face. 

He groaned. 

"Shh."

One of the more familiar voices, much closer than the others. 

He tried to ask why, but the sound came out garbled. He tried again, asking for the time. 

"Six-ish." 

"Morn'n?"

"Night."

He groaned again.

"Wha'?"

"You slept for fifteen hours, give or take." 

"Bro?" 

When his brain caught up and filtered all of the information it was trying to take in at the same time, he realised why he knew that smell, the voice, the repetitive motion of fingers in his bangs. He tried to take in a deep breath but only coughed, then tried again more slowly.

"Jesus, if nothing else this whole series of events is just more proof that you're a complete lightweight," Dirk said, almost laughing. 

"What?" 

More information was starting to process and the details were slowly flowing back into place. He remembered the sudden, inexplicable rush of adrenaline and the need to redirect it, but being distracted. It surfaced as some kind of word vomit instead, but he couldn't recall how it had ended. 

"The t-l-d-r is that some cool kid, namely one Dave Strider, lost his cool and flipped his shit better than a McDonald's fry-cook." 

"Why do I feel like I snorted two pounds of codeine?" 

"That's a story for later. You want to try sitting up?" 

He nodded.

It didn't feel like he'd slept for fifteen hours. It felt like he'd managed maybe forty minutes and had been woken by an unruly alarm. He sat up, slowly, twisting to prop his back against the wall. It wasn't even his own wall. 

"How're you here?"

"Airplanes and timezones."

"Huh. You're not mad?"

"C'mon, Dave. Don't make me do the feelings shit already. You know I hate the feelings shit," Dirk laughed as Dave dropped his head onto his shoulder. "What's there to be mad about?"

"Losing my cool so bad you had to fly in and fix it," Dave mumbled, adjusting the blanket so it was up over his shoulders again after he dragged his knees up to his chest. "Long distance flying makes you mad."

"Oh, fuck, now you've done it. Here come the feelings, bro, ain't nothing you can do to stop 'em now," Dirk said, with a relatively straight face. "The way I see it, this shit was inevitable. I was sort of hoping you'd hold out a few more weeks what with it almost being your birthday and all, but this is what, the first time you've had the option to just fall to fucking pieces in like two years?"

"Yeah, the option, sure," Dave said. He tried reaching into his pockets for his phone, but he wasn't wearing his hoodie and his shorts didn't even have pockets. He left his hand lying on the mattress. 

"I moved out eighteen months ago, kiddo," Dirk said, as he checked his own phone. "Rose went not long after that and then it was just you and Rox."

"And?"

"And you pulled the longest babysitting gig in history on your mom. For some reason you got it in your head that you were some kind of knight in sweats and Chucks, so no chance to stop there. College, the city, homework, classwork, working for me to help get the book done, it all adds up."

"Yeah." 

"Sometimes I think you're too much like her for your own good. She doesn't think so, but it's pretty obvious to anyone with half a brain. You probably would have somehow turned out just like her even if I'd half-assedly raised you on my own in Texas," Dirk said. 

"Uh huh."

"Feeling any more awake yet?" 

Dave knew it was a deliberate question designed with the intention of completely changing the subject. What he didn't know was how Dirk could tell that even mentioning his sister was enough to remind Dave just how much he missed his mom. 

"Enough to know I need to piss." 

"You're on your own for that one. But hurry up, because there's like three things I need to tell you and it'd be sweet if I could get at least one out of the way while you're still doped up to your eyeballs." 

Dave snorted and made a poor attempt at punching Dirk's upper arm. He kicked the blanket aside and fought to disentangle his feet from the material before sliding off the side of the bed. It took a few seconds to find and keep his balance before he could even start walking; he paused by the door and crouched to make faces at Paul in her tank before he kept going. 

On his way back from the bathroom he stopped, at the end of the hall, because Karkat was sitting on the couch watching him. 

He'd almost completely forgotten he wasn't in his own building. 

"Did you explode in your pants when he sat down in your room?" 

"And here I was thinking I'd get at least a full day's respite from your bullshit," Karkat replied, without missing a beat. "Dinner's up in like twenty minutes." 

"What's your mom making?"

"It's safe for white people." 

"Awesome," Dave said. He turned from the waist and felt his back crack in four places. "Talk later?"

"Yeah." 

"Cool." 

The exchange was clipped and straight to the point, both things that Karkat never relied on in normal conversation. Whatever Dave had said last night, he knew Karkat had spent the whole day tearing it apart to figure out how to fix it. 

He turned again and went back to the bedroom, where Dirk was now sitting in the office chair with his feet up on the edge of Karkat's bed, his legs crossed at the ankles. 

"Better?" 

"Bladder successfully emptied," Dave mumbled, giving a mock salute as he sat back down on the mattress. He leant against the wall and returned the blanket to its previous place over his knees. 

"Okay, number one," Dirk said, propping his elbows on the armrests of his chair before linking his fingers together. "I called your dorm and they're installing you some blackout blinds and two layers of curtains first thing in the morning."

"No shit?"

"Yeah. I can't do jack about the noise but you'll get used to that. I also can't do jack shit about the world outside your specific room, but it's a start. Vantas Senior is working on getting you an appointment with some guy he knows so instead of us dragging you back upstate for your next checkup, which was actually supposed to be a month ago, we can shift everything to someone local. I called the Doc back home and he's got your shit ready to pass on to whoever you end up seeing here. We should know that by Wednesday at the latest. Maybe this guy will even have something new to try, who knows." 

Dave nodded.

"Number two," Dirk went on, unlinking his fingers long enough to hold up two two of them. "You've been granted a three month extension on the project art. I'm not happy with half the shit I've written for it because I tried toning down the levels of batshit insanity, and now Cal and half his posse come across as shitty caricatures instead of what they actually are. I might need one or two extra pieces from you but I won't know until about March."

"And you get an extra three months before you need to find a job."

"And that."

Dave tried to reach for his phone again. Still wearing shorts, still no pockets. 

"Number three?"

"I don't want to tell you three," Dirk admitted. 

Dave couldn't tell if he was joking or not, so there had to be at least some sincerity to the statement. 

"That bad?"

"Bad, but mostly good. Thanksgiving is cancelled."

"What? Why?"

"Because of Christmas."

"The two have always co-existed pretty well before now, what's so different about this year?"

It was hard not to sound annoyed, but Dave hoped that the fact he still felt like he'd been hit by a train was muting the irritation in his voice. 

"You're going to Washington. The state. Seattle, if you want specifics. There's a suburb as well -"

"Maple fucking Valley," Dave interrupted, turning three words into one. "Fuck off."

"One hundred percent truth," Dirk laughed, watching as Dave fell sideways to lie down on the bed, with the blanket pulled up over his face. "You're going to meet the family."

"Oh, God. No fucking way. Oh, fuck, I have to punch John so hard in the dick."

"Look, I don't want to know what the kids are into these days."

"So you're just sending me over?" Dave asked, throwing the blanket back off his face again. 

"You're meeting Rose at Newark and the two of you will meet your mom in Seattle," Dirk explained. "And from there you're her problem."

"And you?"

"Going to meet the family."

"Holy shit, you're coming too? Awks," Dave said. 

He rolled over onto his stomach and propped his chin up on his folded arms, staring across at Dirk with a stupid grin on his face. 

"Wrong family."

"Oh my god," Dave deadpanned, but the grin remained. "You're denying me the opportunity to meet my grandparents?"

"Dave."

"You're sending me to meet my cousin and uncle slash brother and stepdad instead of taking me to meet my actual grandparents?"

"Dave."

"This is hilarious."

"This is why I didn't want to tell you, because I knew you'd give me shit for it."

Dirk reached out a foot and kicked Dave in the shoulder with his heel, earning a laugh in response.

"I'm not giving you shit, I'm just saying it like it is."

"You're giving me shit."

"What're you gonna do? Give me shit back?"

"Probably," Dirk said, sitting back up properly in the chair.

"You're actually getting on a plane, flying to another country, and meeting your in-laws?"

"Let's not talk about me. Let's talk about you. You're the one who made me fly here first thing in the morning, in fucking economy."

"Wow, huge sacrifice, Bro. Flying economy like a normal person, shit. Did any of the peasants actually touch you?" Dave asked, turning over again to lie on his back. Three more vertebrae cracked. 

"Look, what I'm trying to say is you've had a shit time the last two years. I've fixed what I can on my end, but I can't fix everything. I'd like to, don't get me wrong. That's my job. My job is making sure you're okay and it always was, but I can't control everything," Dirk said. 

"You'd like to."

"I cannot even tell you how much I'd like to control everything."

"Do you have my phone?"

"Vantas does."

"Damn. I wanted to send Jake my condolences, imagine being him and stuck on an international flight with you."

Dave tipped his head and looked over when he heard Dirk stand up. The next thing he knew, there was a new pair of shades lying on his chest and Paul sitting on the mattress, right beside his face. 

"Food should almost be done. Take five, test those out, and come rejoin society," Dirk said, pulling the door half closed on his way back out to the rest of the apartment.

Dave knew that his last comment, combined with swinging the door around, was intended to get him to change back into a pair of jeans. Instead, he pulled a kissy face at Paul, who darted forwards and tried to bite at his nose; he gave up one of his knuckles instead when she couldn't reach. It kept her occupied while he slipped the red tint mirrored Aviators onto his nose with his free hand, taking a moment to adjust to the change in his vision. 

He worked his knuckle free and moved Paul to his shoulder, then stepped out to eat in what would be the strangest mix of company he'd ever had in his life.

+++

\-- turntechGodhead [TG] began pestering ghostyTrickster [GT] at 19:03 --

TG: bro  
TG: question  
TG: if i ever lost my mind would you  
TG: a talk me down off the handle  
TG: b laugh at me  
TG: c ask some questions then laugh  
TG: d drug me with weird doctor sedatives  
TG: ???  
GT: can i phone a friend?  
TG: sure  
GT: okay, well d is out because i don't have access to any weird doctor sedatives.  
GT: i don't think that i would just laugh.   
GT: so it's probably a tie between a and b, so i might have to go 50/50.   
TG: your 50/50 call knocked out b and d  
GT: damn. i guess i'll have to lock in a then.   
GT: i don't really think it's the right answer but i have crossed everything for luck!  
TG: yeah there isn't a right answer i just wanted to know which one you'd go for  
TG: because karkat went for d  
GT: wow.  
GT: new yorkers, am i right?  
TG: you are so right bro  
TG: speaking of  
TG: you better go buy some punch proof dick armor  
GT: oh my god!  
GT: your dad told you????????  
TG: i am in possession of a plane ticket to seattle as we speak  
TG: well  
TG: im currently in possession of some kind of weird doctor sedative hangover and a plethora of feelings about the last twenty four hours  
TG: but i got this sick new pair of shades so  
GT: ten days, dave! you're going to be here in washington for ten whole days!  
TG: tell me about it  
TG: hey i have to go because karkats mom is giving me weird looks for using my phone at the table  
TG: paul says hi  
TG: talk later  
GT: yeah, okay.   
GT: hey dave, before you go?  
TG: ?  
GT: a is definitely the right answer.  
TG: you win the million bucks john  
TG: see ya

\-- turntechGodhead [TG] ceased pestering ghostyTrickster [GT] at 19:11 --


	7. [I15]: I Was Here

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which it is quiet.

**November, 2014**

Karkat sighed. 

The last thing he was going to do was admit that sitting alone in a silent apartment was boring. As soon as boredom was something he acknowledged, something happened that would ensure the next three days were anything but. It was good, he thought instead. No brothers trying to force people into unnecessarily theological debates. No parents living in their own busy worlds. 

No friends having breakdowns. 

He closed the fridge and wandered back to his room, a Red Bull in one hand and a small bunch of kale in the other. He put the can down on his desk then went back over to Paul's tank and moved one of the lid panels back. She looked up, watching, waiting for her food to start falling from the sky. He let her snap one of the largest leaves from his hand and put the rest down beside her favourite basking spot. She stared lazily, attacking the kale like she always did while he scratched the top of her head. 

When stood up and wiped his hands on the back of his jeans, something different caught his eye. 

Scrawled in the bottom right-hand corner of the poster above Paul's tank was a message that hadn't been there the previous morning. 

_I was here  
-Dirk 11/15/14_


	8. [A5A5]: first family christmas

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which it is Christmas and everyone is all over the place.

**December, 2014**

"I need to piss, I'll be back."

Jake didn't respond because he knew that by the time he even tried, Dirk would have already made half a lap around the cabin. Instead, he turned in his seat, shifting the pillow from the window to his head rest, so that he'd be ready to talk when Dirk sat back down for the eighth time in two hours. 

Long haul flights with Dirk Strider were hell. 

It had all started two months earlier, when Jake suggested over dinner one night that he should come along on his trip home for Christmas. Dirk agreed, they continued eating, and the decision was made. 

A week later, the cracks began to surface. 

Short flights weren't a problem. He could handle short distance without too much of an issue. But once the flights got up over four or five hours, he started to completely fall apart at the seams. Jake had needed to convince him that their best bet was the route he always took when flying back to England for the holidays - San Diego, to Fort Worth, to London. He'd been flying that route for years. Dirk had been unsure, but he agreed. 

Economy wasn't an option, not for an almost ten hour flight. Business was problematic, because the new seat designs meant that even if they were sitting in consecutive seats, the arrangement was awkward. The only real alternative was premium economy, and even then, Dirk had spent more than the socially acceptable amount of time scrutinising the available seats. He even sat Jake down and used him as a sounding board to talk through their options. 

If it was up to him, he would have chosen two seats side by side and that would have been the end of it. But from Dirk's perspective, it was a lot more complicated than that. He could sit in the rear of the section and have the exits in his line of sight, or he could sit in the front row and ensure he wouldn't end up with someone else's seat reclining into his face.

It took him an entire day to decide on the extra breathing room and lock in the front row seats. 

It was another week before Jake could convince him to book two nights in London, to calm down and recover after what would obviously be nothing short of an ordeal. 

"Is the door still safely locked?" 

"Smart ass," Dirk replied, sitting back down in the aisle seat a few minutes later. "But yeah, it's cool."

"Order a drink and go to sleep," Jake suggested. "Order more than one. Perhaps six."

"I'm fine."

"Your life is in the pilot's hands."

"Please don't remind me."

"Order a drink."

"Maybe later."

"Dirk," Jake warned sharply. "There are seven hours left of this flight and unless you and your neuroses are actively interested in arriving in a body bag, I suggest you take some darn initiative and order a bloody whiskey right now." 

He picked up his pillow again and returned it to the window, shifting once again to try and get some sleep. 

It was quiet for a few minutes after that. Once Dirk finished settling back into his seat he was still for at least five minutes - Jake didn't want to risk looking at his watch to see if that was a new record. In what seemed like a cruel twist of fortune, he was no longer in immediate need of sleep because Dirk sitting still for over ten minutes was definitely a record. If he made it to twenty minutes, he'd open his eyes. 

The only problem was, he had no way of knowing if it had been a full twenty minutes.

Preoccupied with plans to sneak a glance at his watch, Jake knew that any move he made would give away the fact that he wasn't asleep. At least, it would give away the fact he'd started pretending to be asleep. He began counting, hoping to get through a few more minutes like that. 

"Yeah, I'm sorry. You're right, you're totally fucking right. You want anything?" Dirk asked, leaning over as he pressed the call button. "Jake?"

Eighteen minutes. 

He exhaled heavily, still feigning sleep as Dirk ordered two whiskey's and knocked them back as soon as the attendant's footsteps faded away.

He woke up what felt like hours later, slumped against Dirk's shoulder.

"Did you sleep?" 

"An hour or two, on and off," Dirk replied. "Only two until landing. The lights just went up, breakfast will be around soon."

"Splendid," Jake yawned, sitting up properly in his chair to stretch as best he could. "Christ, I could go a cup of tea about now."

"You know you're only getting warm water at this altitude, right?"

"I'll take it."

"Hey, weird question. Your parents are cool with all this, right?" Dirk asked, trying to sound casual, even though Jake knew immediately that he was anything but.

"You speak with them every month or so, you'd know by now if they weren't."

"Look, I'm just going to lay this shit out, right now."

"Please don't, we're in public."

"No, what? It's just that it might explain all this bullshit right here," Dirk went on.

"You really are a nervous wreck, aren't you?" Jake asked, concerned, as he adjusted to face Dirk despite the limited seat room.

"Look, the flight is one thing. I fly all the time, and nine consecutive hours might be too long for me to comfortably be in the sky, but I'll deal with it. But the last time I met someone's parents it was nineteen ninety-three, completely unintentional, and the first thing they did was ask if I had aids, because fuck the early nineties," Dirk said. "And that was one of the good ones."

"You're an idiot," Jake said, reaching over to gently pat his cheek with a pitiful smile. "If there was even the smallest chance of something going wrong, I wouldn't have brought you along. My parents are not your parents, at least not in attitude."

"Yeah."

"Now move your arse because I'd like to make it to the toilet before we're trapped in by food carts."

"Where to? We're in fuckin' economy," Dirk said, turning his knees out into the aisle so Jake could pass. 

"Premium."

"It's still economy."

"You are the living embodiment of a first world problem," Jake said, laughing as he wandered off to the rear of the cabin. "You know," he said, just continuing on with his train of thought after returning from the bathroom. "In retrospect, I can't even recall what the reaction was the first time I brought a boy home. I assume it was something akin to an informal interrogation like in all the films, but with the threats of violence much more subtle. I do remember that there was one my father threatened to have sent over to fight in the Gulf War, but that could have just as easily been the poor lass I took to the 6th Form formal."

"So the real reason we've never been to visit your parents before now was the second Gulf War?"

"I suppose we could make that argument. My grandfather, on my mothers' side, was known for sending her potential suitors to India. Turns out my father thrived over there for a few years and the whole plan backfired," Jake explained. 

"Oh my God."

"Oh, relax, I'm making it up. We were out of India long before that would have been a possibility. But however ridiculous that story was, that's what you sound like when you babble your unnecessary concerns."

"Shit, I hope they'll let me order a drink with breakfast," Dirk said, leaning his head back against his seat to wait for what would probably be the most underwhelming meal of his life.

It took more than twenty minutes to actually disembark the plane once it landed.

They had to split up at immigration, because Jake was arriving on his British passport. He passed through security in minutes, his clearance level fast tracking him through different, almost non-existent queues. Dirk could only watch the back of his head disappear through the crowd and hope that it wouldn't take too long for his own line to process. 

As soon as they had touched down, he'd started to feel human again. International flights opened up too many variables and he could never be sure that he'd taken all of the potential failures into account. A 747 filled to capacity meant there were too many idiots in too little space, and if any one of them were to make a single bad move, everyone would suffer. 

He counted himself as one of the biggest idiots on the plane - not because he was stupid, but because he knew too much.

It took almost forty-five minutes to clear security. Jake was waiting for him just beyond the immigration checkpoint, coffee in one hand and a duty-free bag in the other. 

"Coffee to wake you up, nicotine to calm you down," he said, passing over the takeaway cup and gesturing to the plastic bag. "Tube connection's this way."

"God, this is awful," Dirk said. He pulled a face after only a sip of the coffee, falling into step beside Jake as best he could while dragging a suitcase. 

"It's from an airport kiosk, of course it's awful. For memory, there's a Starbucks at Paddington," Jake said.

"Never let it go unsaid that I'm a huge fan of the process of globalization. Hotel first," Dirk said. He took a second and final mouthful of the coffee and threw the entire cup, liquid and all, into the next garbage can he passed. "No, third. Smoke first, Starbucks second, hotel third."

+++

"Rose?"

"Hmm?" 

"I need you to search your cold, long dead heart for any shred of sisterly affection that's left right now," Dave said, slowly, as if he was choosing his words carefully. 

"I might be able to find some, in the right circumstances," Rose replied. "What do you need?" 

"In about twelve seconds, I think I'm going to need you to told my frapp."

"You'd trust me that much?"

"No," Dave said, as they walked even closer to the exit doors. "But it's that or the floor."

"So you appreciate me more than a few tiles, I see," she said. She switched the handle of her carry-on bag into her left hand, so her right would be free when Dave inevitably gave no signal that he was about to hand over his drink. "Anything else?"

"Yeah," he said, hesitating as the doors opened in front of them. "Don't put this on Instagram." 

He made it three seconds before thrusting his Starbucks cup into Rose's waiting hand. He took off at a run, still dragging his own carry-on through the crowded terminal hall. 

The suitcase clattered to the floor as he dropped the handle, took another few steps, and unabashedly threw his arms around John. 

In return, John let out a surprised yelp and tried to take half a step back, but Dave just moved as well to prevent either of them from losing their balance. It took a moment, but John laughed and returned the gesture, lifting his arms to become an active participant in the long-awaited hug. 

"Hey," Dave said.

"Nice glasses," John replied. 

"Says you, four eyes."

"At least I take my glasses off when I sleep."

"Oh, sick burn."

"And I'm not like some weird overgrown twig."

"Ouch. You didn't even say hello before going for all these burns."

"Hi, Dave."

"There we go."

"Is this getting awkward for you? Because it's getting awkward for me," John said. 

"Yeah, I kinda decided it was awkward as soon as I hugged you, but I'm pretty dedicated to this shit right now," Dave explained. "Let go on my count?"

Dave counted backwards from five. When he got to one, they both dropped their arms, each moved a step back, and he took his frappuccino from where Rose was holding it out for him. 

"And that's how you greet your best fucking bro of all time," he said, grinning from behind his mirrored shades.

"It was pretty lame," John said.

Dave shoved him sideways.

"Okay, kids, let's hightail it outta here," Roxy said, pulling Dave forwards to press a kiss to his forehead. "Because as much as I love all of you, that's the amount I love airports right now, but in the negative. Who's driving, Johnny, me or you?" 

"You," John said quickly. "And Rose can have the front seat."

"Aw, ain't that sweet of you?" Roxy laughed; if Rose sat up front, that left Dave free to sit in the back. "Don't forget your bag, baby. The last thing we need is security escorting us from the building," she added, linking her arm with her daughters'. 

Dave couldn't stop himself from continually checking that John was really there. They bumped shoulders as they walked and shoved each other off curbs onto roads, all before they even got into the car. Dave and Rose's suitcases went into the trunk, followed by Rose's backpack; Dave's went on the floor, between his feet, so that once he stowed his almost-empty frappuccino in a cup holder, he could swap it for his camera.

He knew the snow would throw off his white balance but that wasn't the point. He snapped shots of the airport terminal as Roxy drove out of the short-term parking lot, of Rose's eyes reflected off the vanity mirror, of John leaning forward in his seat with the belt's tension ready to pull him back to safety. 

It was half an hour back to his house, John explained, once they were on the freeway. Rose rolled her eyes when Dave suggested he could probably make it in twenty if he was driving, but Roxy shut down his chances before John could even finish daring him to prove it.

"Hey, Mom, have you talked to Bro yet?" Dave asked, returning his camera to its carry bag.

"Not on the phone, you seriously think I have a death wish or something? I think he landed sometime yesterday though. Have you?" Roxy asked, glancing at him in the rear view mirror. 

"Just some Snapchats. Apparently the first thing he did after he got off the train was get a fucking Starbucks."

"How outrageous," Rose said, in mock horror. 

"I know, right? He tears me a new one every other week for drinking the stuff but bam, put him in another country and all he wants is the same shit he can get back home."

"Look, the important thing is we can all be glad it's not us stuck with him in another country where he's unfamiliar with a full hundred and sixty three percent of his surroundings," Roxy said, turning the car into another suburban side street. "It's only been a day and I would've strangled him already."

"You think I should call Jake?" Dave asked. "I should, right? Like just to make sure they're both still alive? I'm gonna message him."

"Let me know how that turns out, baby."

"Hey, we're here!" John exclaimed, unbuckling his seatbelt before Roxy even finished turning into the drive. "Man, this is so awesome!"

They watched as John bounded out of the car as soon as it stopped. He ran halfway across the yard then doubled back, his hands tapping out an unknown rhythm on the steel as he waited impatiently for Roxy to pop the trunk.

"Well, I suppose we no longer need to wonder if he's anything like he is online," Rose said.

"Oh, hun," Roxy said, laughing as she finally pressed the button to unlock the trunk. "Okay, quick Strilonde family meeting. Unlike either of you, who I am infinitely proud of and love unquestionably despite your awful, awful attitudes, John is like some being of endless good. And I mean, like, he's good right down to the core, probably because I never got my grubby mitts on him early enough for the family snark to take hold. Look, just don't fuck him up, okay?"

Both Dave and Rose were silent for almost a full minute, until John slammed the trunk closed again. 

"Oh my God," Dave said, opening his door. "Oh my fucking God, Mom. No. Just no."

He slammed the car door once he was out in the drive and leant over to shake his head where Roxy could see it, mouthing one final 'no' for good measure. 

He went around to pick up his suitcase and followed John up towards the house, kicking clumps of snow at him as they walked. 

"What are they talking about, you think?" John asked, as he pushed the front door open. "Dad! We're back!"

"Secret lady business, for sure," Dave said. "Nice place." 

"Thanks. Dad!" 

"Oh, shit, is that your dead Nanna?" 

"You know it is, Dave." 

"Look, I'm just saying that of course we're best bros if we both keep dead things on shelves," Dave said, leaving his carry-on by the couch. He slipped his backpack off his shoulder again and put it down as well, moving to inspect the urn above the fireplace. "But unless your Nanna had like, magic powers or something, my dead things are cooler." 

"Oh, come on, baby," Roxy said. She closed the front door behind her, indicating for Rose to leave her bags beside Dave's. "Try not to be weird for ten whole minutes, would you? Where's your dad, Johnny?" 

"I dunno," John shrugged. "Probably upstairs?"

"Oh well, he's here somewhere," she went on. "Okay. Rosie, honey, you're sleeping in the study down here. We've set up a spare mattress for you. It's on the floor but it's super comfy and covered in like eight blankets. Sound good?"

"I suppose it's acceptable," Rose said. She smiled though, in a way that indicated she was still on guard and choosing her words carefully.

"Acceptable my ass, I had to go to Target last night for half of those blankets. Baby, you're upstairs with John. You got the short end of the deal and ended up with the inflatable mattress though. Sorry," Roxy explained. 

"Did you have to get that at Target as well?" Dave asked. 

"No, Walmart." 

"Oh my God, can we please, and I'm genuinely asking this question right now, please go to fucking Walmart? I want to know what it's like going to one when you don't know everyone working there. I bet it's more fun," he said. 

John just stared at him blankly. 

"Okay, no Walmart? Fine."

"I can't believe you'd actually want to go to Walmart," John said, pulling a face. "Whatever, c'mon, grab your stuff so I can show you where everything is." 

"Dude, I've seen your place on Skype and shit, I know where everything is." 

"Yeah, but it's different when it's a real place and full of actual things you can walk into."

"Bullshit. I bet I could find everything without you having to point it out first," Dave said, as he re-shouldered his backpack and grabbed his suitcase. "Pick something." 

"You should find the bathroom so you can flush your own head, nerd," John said, shoving Dave towards the stairs. 

"Me? The nerd? Them's big words coming from you, Egbert." 

Roxy just watched as the boys clambered up the stairs, waiting until they were well out of sight to roll her eyes. 

"Are we taking bets on how long it is before one of them grievously injures the other?" Rose asked. She didn't even bother trying to work her way out of her mother's one-armed hug that was suddenly holding her uncomfortably close. 

"Physically or mentally?" Roxy inquired. 

"Either." 

"Huh. Johnny'll dare him to do something stupid and he'll do it by Wednesday." 

"My money is on Dave saying something that revolutionises John's world before the day is over." 

"Fifty?" Roxy asked.

"Naturally. Anything less would make this an immoral wager," Rose said. "Of course, there are some who would argue betting on any of your children is immoral." 

"Oh please, anyone who tried to pull that argument on me is the kind of person to persecute me for not being a biological mother to either of them," Roxy said dismissively. "But the fact is, they're both as much mine as you are, and you've won me hells of bets with your uncle over the years."

+++

"So."

"So?"

"So, I've been meaning to ask. How many ancient ex's were blessed with the opportunity to see this disaster of a childhood bedroom?"

"Oh, gosh. Uh, three?"

"It was a rhetorical question, Jake," Dirk said, slowly exhaling a lungful of smoke out of the open window. "Three? Really?" 

He tried not to sound as surprised as he was. 

"Well, definitely two. The third probably doesn't count in the context of your question," Jake went on, searching through their suitcase for a shirt he couldn't remember packing. "We never got up to any funny business up here." 

"If those photos your mom hauled out yesterday were anything to go by, colour me surprised."

"Oh please, you've seen my childhood photos countless times. I don't even know how many there are in the dining room at home." 

"Yeah, but god damn," Dirk paused to take another drag on his cigarette. "Puberty hit you like a fucking semi doing ninety on the freeway," he finished, before exhaling again. "Less 'here's me and my dog when I was eight' and more 'here's the vacation we took after I graduated college', please." 

"You know that my college was equivalent to your junior and senior years, don't you? I was seventeen in those pictures you were ogling," Jake explained as he changed into a clean t-shirt. 

"I'm asking for copies." 

"I don't want to know." 

"God, seventeen year old you was so far out of my fucking league," Dirk said. "Like, precisely jack shit would have succeeded between us if we'd met back then."

"Codswallop. I've seen photos of you from the same period, no thanks to your sister. You were obviously a bit rough around the edges but I might have briefly considered you for the adventure alone."

"Yeah, but the photos don't show you how much of an asshole I was."

"You still are," Jake pointed out.

"I know. So imagine what I was like back before I managed to reel in the attitude. I would have tried to kick your ass then apologised and asked you out, repeatedly, in some sort of horrific cycle of uncontrolled teenage lunatic hormones," Dirk said. 

He examined his cigarette then took a long drag, then another shorter one until the paper burnt right down to the filter. He put the butt out on the windowsill and threw it into the garden. As he exhaled, he wiped the timber free of ash before finally closing the window. 

"Well somehow that mess of lunatic hormones grew into the adult who pulled the ever classic distraction by adorable children method on me," Jake said. He pulled on a fresh pair of socks. 

"Hell, I didn't even pay 'em to be cute that afternoon. I did pay for all the driving I did that week, though. Man, that put a hell of a lot of miles on the Camry."

"Well, I vaguely remember it being three days before you agreed to come back to the hotel with me, so it was most certainly your own fault." 

"Yeah, because I didn't want to look easy and you'd told me straight up you were only in town for those three nights. I was trying to make a point here, before we got distracted by all this bullshit," Dirk said, searching through the suitcase for a clean shirt of his own. "What was the motivation for the Bowie poster?"

"What's your motivation in asking for copies of my youthful holiday photos?"

"Touche."

"Now, was there anything in particular you wanted to do today?" Jake asked. 

Dirk figured that the question was more an act of politeness than anything else. It was the morning of Christmas Eve and they were, for all intents and purposes, stranded in the middle of nowhere. 

It had taken them almost an hour to get to Newbury by train only two days earlier, and from there they'd been driven another few miles down the road to a village that was smaller again. Jake had always said that his parents lived in a rural area, but when they were actually in a car travelling the winding country lanes, Dirk started to get the feeling he'd been understating the whole thing. 

The house was old. While their house in San Diego dated back almost a century, he would have believed that the English family home was older than his country. It was much larger than it looked, with a lifetime of possessions crammed into every corner. The doorways were low and the ceilings all had uncovered dark timber beams running through them, like the country houses in every British movie Dirk had ever seen. 

They spent the morning doing absolutely nothing.

It was a strange thing to have no responsibilities, even just for a few days. By mid-afternoon, Dirk could feel his mind starting to switch off altogether after spending the better part of a week giving it nothing specific to focus on. He'd excused himself from a conversation to find something to do, because the last thing he wanted was to lose all semblance of his mental faculties before the trip was over.

He was sitting alone in the conservatory, drawing rough page layouts and leaving notes in the margins to go over some other time when Jake sat down by his feet, on the far end of the couch. 

"Mum's asked if I can nip up to the shops to get some pumpkin for tomorrow. Will you be alright here for half an hour or so?"

Dirk finished scribbling a sentence before he looked up.

"You do know that your accent has been twice as thick since we got here, right?" 

"Has it?"

"Yeah, it's kind of ridiculous," he said, with a gentle laugh. "So are you walking or driving?"

"Walking, it's hardly worth trying to park anywhere near the shops. You'll be okay?" Jake asked. 

"Yeah, I think I can manage to keep myself out of trouble for a full thirty minutes." 

"Alright. Anything you want me to pick up while I'm out?" 

"Yeah, get me some more foreign cookies to try, the orange ones from the other day. And whatever local booze you can find." 

"Jaffa cakes and beer, of course," Jake said. He stood up again and clapped Dirk's shoulder as he walked out of the room. "Back soon." 

Dirk waited until Jake's heavy footsteps disappeared through the house. He heard voices, then a door closing; he checked the time on his phone and waited another five minutes for good measure. 

When an exact five minutes had passed, almost down to the second, he abandoned his notebook on the couch and wandered back through the house, ducking through the doorways as he went, until he made it back to the kitchen. 

If the last few days had taught him anything, it was that morning and afternoon tea times followed a set pattern. Morning at ten-thirty, afternoon at three-thirty. When he stepped into the kitchen at three twenty-eight, Jake's mother was in the process of putting the biscuit tin on the table while the kettle came to a rolling boil. 

He sat down at the table, wordlessly, and let her fill a mug they both knew he wouldn't finish. 

"You've been busy, have you dear?" 

"Uh, kind of. I've been working at the most basic level that can possibly be passed off as working. I made some notes." 

"Good, good. Now, do you fancy some cake or are the biscuits enough?" 

"They're fine. Look, I wanted to talk to you both about something," Dirk started. He bit into a plain biscuit because if nothing else, it gave him a few extra seconds to go over his planned conversation one last time. 

"Is everything alright?" 

"Peachy."

He shoved the remaining half of the biscuit into his mouth.

Dirk knew that his expression had let a blatant display of nerves slip through when Jake's father pushed a box of hand-rolled cigarettes across the table towards him.

He shook his head. 

"Sugar?"

"No, thanks. Okay, I want to do this properly but I also really, _really_ just want to get it over with because it feels like I'm running on borrowed time already."

"Are you certain that everything's alright? You don't look well." 

There was concern there. He didn't know how to deal with concern from anyone older than him, because his own parents had never shown any. The first time he'd easily recognised concern on the face of an adult was during his senior year, after everything had gone to shit and he was on the brink of splintering into thousands of irreparable pieces. He probably would have if his Home Economics teacher hadn't intervened before it was too late. 

He took the mug in his hands, the warmth seeping through the ceramic enough to convince him that there was a universe where his mug was filled with coffee. If there was a plane of existence where he had a coffee, there was definitely one where his coffee was no less than a third whiskey.

"I'm fine. Okay, here we go. Shit, okay. I want to marry your son. Not soon, definitely not any time soon. I'm not planning on rushing anything here and it'll effectively be this time next year before I actually ask him about it, but I'm here now and since I highly doubt I'll be back before next December, here we are. Here we are with me asking for some kind of green light, because at some point along the way I decided that talking to you about it was an integral step in this whole formal process." 

He wondered what a third of a mug of whiskey would taste like in his tea.

"You don't want to rush," Jake's mother asked, after a few moments of not quite comfortable silence. 

"Correct."

"It's been ten years and you don't want to rush." 

"Nine," Dirk corrected. "Nine this year, ten next." 

"And you're waiting for ten to roll around for any particular reason?"

"It's a solid number. Memorable."

"So why not skip what would no doubt be an unnecessarily long engagement and get right to the important part, if ten is such a memorable number?"

"I. Well, I mean. Huh." 

Dirk looked away from his mug towards the pack of cigarettes on the table, still within reach. He'd already had one that morning, but he'd been a little lax on his self-imposed one-a-day rule since Jake had paid for an entire carton in duty-free. Soon. If nothing else, resisting the temptation gave the impression of self-control when all he wanted to do was throw his tea across the room as a distraction and run. 

The woman was old, but she didn't miss a beat.

"Floored you there, haven't I? I'm not as much of a crack shot as I was back in the day but I've still got an eagle-eye for the details," she said with a wink. 

"Yeah. Yeah, I just. I need that time to work out the details for myself." 

"Oh please, there's nothing left to work out. Sign some papers, open a joint bank account if you haven't already, and then you get on with it all like you've been doing for the last decade."

"But the concept is good to go?"

"The concept has been good to go for at least seven years."

"Okay, I'll take it. Good talk," Dirk said. He briefly lifted his mug off the table but put it back down again, when he caught Jake's father lighting a cigarette out of the corner of his eye. He waited for the comment that was obviously coming.

"What kind of person feels the need to put himself through outdated formalities in this day and age?"

"A neurotic control freak with decades of suppressed regret and mild-to-moderate self-depreciative attributes."

"Am I supposed to be concerned for the welfare of my adult son, or impressed by your brazen display of honesty?" 

If the tone was stern, the expression on Jake's father's face was anything but. It was a question designed not to raise doubt in Dirk's mind, but to force him into questioning his own motives in a way that made it seem as if the thoughts were his own.

"Either of those options are probably a waste of time," he said, after a slight pause.

That earned him a laugh in reply.

When the pack was pushed across the table towards him for a second time, he accepted the offer. 

Lukewarm tea, he discovered, went down a lot easier when it was alternated between sweet biscuits and hand-rolled cigarettes. He shook his head when Jake's mother offered to refill his mug a few minutes later though, unsure of his ability to drink any more of the stuff in one sitting. 

When Jake walked into the kitchen a little while later, plastic grocery bag in one hand and an entire pumpkin tucked under the other arm, Dirk was most of the way through a second roll up. 

"So," he asked, sliding the pumpkin onto the counter. "What are we all talking about?"

"Dave," Dirk replied, watching Jake carefully as he turned to put the beer straight into the fridge. If Jake noticed that the reply had come too quickly for it to be natural, he wasn't giving anything away. 

"Ah, a good a topic as any!" Jake said. He slid into the free chair on Dirk's right. "He's been doing marvellously the last few weeks, hasn't he? Took a while to settle into city life, the poor chap, but he's been smashing right through all those nasty obstacles and seems to be back on track now."

+++

"Hey Johnny, have you seen Dave in the last half hour?" 

"Yeah, he's in my closet." 

John replied to Roxy's question without looking up. He was trying to take a Snapchat and get a coke from the fridge at the same time, focusing the majority of his attention on not dropping his phone in the process. 

"Is that normal?" 

"Yeah, for him it is. Closets tend to be universally dark so they're good places to go for some alone time with his broken irises," Roxy said. 

John was glad that she was there to explain it to his dad, because he knew that he would have tried to crack a joke and only succeeded in getting everyone more confused than they already were. 

He was struggling to open the can with his one free hand, even with the soda sitting on the countertop; it just kept sliding back whenever he managed to work a fingernail under the tab. 

"Does he need anything from the drugstore?"

"I'll go talk to him," Roxy said. She reached over John's shoulder and took the can, popping it open for him while she pulled a funny face in the background of his selfie. He changed tactics when he saw her and grinned widely, taking a nice photo instead. "There you go, genius." 

"Thanks. Hey, if he does need anything can we borrow the car and go?" John asked. 

"We'll see," his Dad replied quickly. "Are you doing anything right now?" 

"No?"

"Wonderful. You're now officially on frosting duty for the next thirty minutes." 

"Ugh, but Dad!"

"I'm only asking for thirty minutes of your time, John." 

"Fine," John huffed. He took a swig of coke and put the can back into the fridge, then shoved his phone into his back pocket. "Only if we can borrow the car this afternoon."

"Who dared who to do what now, hmm?" Roxy asked. She was almost out of the kitchen by then but stopped to lean against the door frame until she got her answer. 

"What? No one dared anyone to do anything." 

"But you want the car because..?"

"Because there's a lot of people here now," John admitted. "It was supposed to be the coolest of cool bro-time Christmases, but. Yeah." 

Roxy got the feeling she knew exactly what John meant by 'yeah'. 

"I'm just going to check on Davey," she said. She turned and walked through the living room, smoothing down the back of Rose's hair as she passed the couch, and continued on up the stairs and down the hall. 

She just pushed open the door to John's room and walked in, side-stepping the piles of clothing that had built up quickly over the last few days and sat down in the clear space where Dave's air mattress had been until the previous afternoon. 

"Baby, you in there?"

"Yeah." 

"You still all good or do you need me to go into the city and mug some degenerates for their opiates?"

"Not cool," Dave said, sliding the door open and crawling out to sit cross-legged opposite his mom. "You want me to go and raid John's dad's liquor cabinet for you?"

"Now that was just mean," Roxy said. "You only ever got on the ship, looked around, and got off again before she set sail. I was still on board when we hit the iceberg and spent three decades waiting for the lifeboats." 

"Confusing, but a good metaphor," he said, sliding his glasses back down onto his nose. "It probably wouldn't hold up to Bro's standards but we all know he's a tightass about the accuracy of his metaphors."

"Name _one_ thing he's not a tightass about." 

"Money. He throws that shit around like it's no big deal." 

"That's because he's a wealthy, middle-aged white man."

"Yeah, but he wasn't always." 

"If he'd been less of an asshole our parents wouldn't have cut him off as early as they did," Roxy pointed out. "That was a whole ordeal because guess who had to listen to them complain about him? Me. For, like, another four years. Then when I fucked up they sent him a check big enough to cover two years of rent out of spite."

"Solid attempt to win him back, sure. What did you do?"

"Oh, I got married, refused to drop out of my Doctoral program when I only had six months to go, got divorced, and kept his name. Obviously," Roxy said flippantly. "So what's got you hiding in the smallest dark place you could find if you're not hankering for a hit?"

" _Dude_."

"Mom, not dude." 

"Oh my God. Are we really doing this?"

"Look, I get serious what, four times a year? This is one of those times, baby. It's Christmas and you're hiding in a cupboard." 

"I'll give you twenty percent anticipatory migraine prevention tactic," Dave said. 

"And the other eighty?"

"Vriska fucking Serket." 

Roxy cocked an eyebrow, encouraging him to go on. 

He didn't. 

"So are you finally going to fill me in on whatever the deal is with her?" 

Dave didn't say anything; he just started pulling up stray threads from the carpet. Roxy knew she could wait him out, whether it took a few minutes or an hour. She knew that eventually he'd cave in and tell her what she wanted to know, just like he always did. At the very least, he'd tell her what she needed to know. 

"Okay, so she's been here for like twenty four hours now so you've figured out she's like the ultimate bitch, right?" Dave said, wiping the stray woollen threads back into the carpet itself. 

It had taken him less than thirty seconds to crack. 

The previous morning, Vriska had turned up on the doorstep with her hair in the world's messiest bun and a backpack slung over one shoulder. John and his dad had invited her over for Christmas, because her family was all back in Florida and she was adamant about not wanting to drive back across the country just to see them. Dave and Rose seemed familiar with her, or at least familiar enough that it wouldn't be too much of an imposition. Vriska was rough and had an inflated sense of entitlement, but Roxy had figured that Dave was just exaggerating about her being an entirely terrible person. 

The first few hours had gone well enough, but around lunchtime things started breaking down. Rose seemed to be on high alert and uncomfortable with the fact that she had to share her space in the study with Vriska. In turn, Vriska seemed annoyed by the prospect of sleeping downstairs on the air mattress while Dave was allowed to stay upstairs in John's room.

Dad ended that particular argument before it could escalate with a straightforward 'my house, my rules'. 

There was something that didn't sit right about her, but Roxy couldn't work out where the truth ended and the melodramatics began. Dave was prone to making things into a much bigger deal than reality would have him believe, while John tended to understate things because he just couldn't see how important the details were. She'd been expecting some kind of middle ground between the two, but the entire equation didn't add up. Vriska was brash and unapologetic, but chose her words carefully. She scanned rooms for adults before she spoke and changed her tune completely when John was in the vicinity. 

There was something there, but for the life of her, Roxy couldn't put her finger on what it was. 

"I wouldn't jump to that conclusion yet, I've only just met her." 

"You've known her for more than five minutes. That's more than enough for anyone," Dave said. 

"Give me something useful here, baby." 

"Yeah, but the kind of useful shit you're trying to dig up here isn't mine to tell you."

"What does that mean?"

"It means I have problems with Vriska because John has problems with Vriska."

Roxy pursed her lips and leant forwards, reaching out to put her hands on each of Dave's cheeks. He frowned and tried to shake his head, but she refused to let go and gently forced him into nodding instead. 

"What kind of problems?"

"Mom, c'mon. Sometimes shit between bros has to stay between bros. How fucking tragic would it look if I tattled on him during our first family Christmas? Really fucking tragic, that's how. Really, _really_ fuckin' tragic," Dave said. He rolled his eyes from behind his glasses and reached up to try and physically remove Roxy's hands from his face; despite his best efforts, she didn't budge. 

He ignored the laugh she gave when his best efforts were nowhere near strong enough; there was no way she'd buy it if he said he wasn't even trying. 

"Dave, I'm stuck in a house with four teenagers and a fiance who is so supportive of my sobriety that the liquor cabinet is actually just half a bottle of vintage scotch that's locked in the safe these days. Let me have this one, would you?"

"Wait, fiance?"

" _Not_ the point, baby. Now spill what you can and I'll interrogate John for the rest later," Roxy said. She finally let her hands fall from Dave's cheeks and sat back upright again. 

"Who's gonna interrogate me for the what now?"

Roxy looked over her shoulder to see John standing in the doorway of his own room, a look of confusion on his face and a streak of frosting in his bangs. 

"You knew he was there, didn't you?" 

"I'm staring right at the fucking door, of course I knew he was there," Dave said coolly, leaning back on his arms. "He only got the end of what you were saying, but y'know. Just say it again."

"No, really, what did I miss?" John asked. He looked up through his glasses and noticed the frosting, then started trying to scrape it out of his hair with his fingernails. 

"Mom wants to know why Vriska's such a bitch."

"Because she had to live in Florida for an entire eighteen years. I'm pretty sure you'd be a bitch if you had to live your whole life in Florida, Dave," John said without missing a beat. He wiped the frosting off on his jeans. "I mean, you are anyway, but man." 

"So what's the deal with you and her, anyway?" Dave prompted. 

"Oh my God, can we not?"

"But she's not your girlfriend, what's the big deal?"

"Yeah, she's not! It's like, I kind of like having her around when she's not being rude but that's it? So like a friend, I guess. Oh my God, don't look at me like that!" John exclaimed, collapsing down on his bed. 

"Dude that's my side." 

"Shut up, Dave!" 

"Okay, okay. Time out," Roxy said, standing up from the floor. "I'll go talk your dad into giving you the car, Johnny. But Dave doesn't get behind the wheel and you're back by five, sound fair?" 

"Yeah," Dave said. "We both know I'm the better driver of this two-man crew though." 

"You're not insured to drive anything worth more than six hundred bucks, baby."

"Can we have some money?"

"For all the exotic shopping Target has to offer? Sure," Roxy said. "Give me five and I'll get you the keys," she went on. She stopped to wipe the remaining frosting out of John's bangs before she left the room. 

Neither one of them said anything until they were sure she was halfway down the stairs again.

"Dude, what are you doing?"

"Look, John, Mom's cool, okay? You could tell her anything and she'd back you up over nine thousand percent of the time. You've known her for years, right? Like that's a totally weird thing to think about from where I'm sitting, but it's true," Dave said. He sat back up properly again and took out his phone; Snaps from John while he'd been downstairs, twelve tumblr asks, and a mile of unread Pesterlogs from Karkat. 

"Yeah, but she's always been like, Dad's girlfriend, so it's not the same," John said, swivelling so that his head was hanging off the edge of his bed. 

"Egbert, you could tell Mom that you're totally into one of the actual dragons from Game of Thrones and write self-insert fanfics about your torrid love affair actually being the thing that tore Westeros apart, and she wouldn't bat an eyelid. She'd just be like, cool, let me show you this list I have of actually good fanfics on the topic," Dave explained. "Throw her a bone and she'll absolutely spend the rest of the week making sure Vriska doesn't try to pull any of her A-grade Serket shit." 

"Maybe I do like her though?"

"Not as much as she likes you."

"Ugh, girls are hard." 

"You're telling me. Let's pack up this bro-time feelings jam and hit the road," Dave said. He'd already cleared the ask alerts to reply to later on, flicked through John's Snaps, and skimmed Karkat's Pesterchum window to try and figure out what he was talking about. "Let me drive. I'm better than you." 

"No way."

"Way."

"Nope."

"Ye."

"Never."

"Please?"

"Oh my God, Dave, you know that word?"

+++

"You put a photograph of me on Twitter."

Dirk paused mid-way through trying to break a string of thread between his teeth. He proceeded more slowly after Jake sat down close beside him on the couch, tugging at the cotton until it snapped and refusing to look up between attempts to re-thread his needle. 

Jake's mother hadn't believed that he could neatly hand stitch an invisible zipper into place, so he had, naturally, taken her up on the challenge after dinner. 

"You use Instagram exclusively for photos of your own face next to various zoo animals," Dirk quipped.

"Not the point."

"You're on my feed all the time. You're incidentally in at least forty percent of my videos and about twelve percent of that you're actively in. Your face has been published in magazines and journals."

"And in none of those instances was I ever in my swimsuit." 

"Jake."

"Dirk."

"I can't tell if you're mad." 

"Why would you do that?"

"Because it's a great fuckin' picture," Dirk said. "Sorry," he added, briefly cringing at the dropped expletive. "You want me to take it down or something?"

"Maybe. I've not entirely decided on the best course of action yet," Jake said. 

"Sorry," Dirk said again, before he leant over and pressed a kiss to Jake's jaw. He dropped another by his ear, and quietly added, "all the comments agree with me."

Jake didn't look as impressed as Dirk had hoped he would. 

"That isn't as much of a help as you were probably hoping for it to be, mate," Jake said. "Wait, what are they saying?"

"Look for yourself." 

Dirk switched all of his fabric to one hand and picked up his cell from where it had been lying on the coffee table. He flicked through to his Twitter notifications then passed the phone to Jake. 

He wasn't stupid enough to read any of the comments aloud, not in front of Jake's parents. They were distracted enough by the television that the conversation had almost entirely gone over their heads, but not distracted enough to ignore him dictating feedback from the internet. 

There was nothing too disgusting, not that Dirk had noticed, but it was enough to make his initial statement pale in comparison. He felt entirely justified, as an adult in an increasingly committed relationship, to mention just how smoking hot Jake had looked as a teenager in a very well fitted pair of swim trunks. 

It was obvious that Jake had tried to create an image similar to what he saw in classic movies; the haircut was parted with his bangs carefully flicked to one side and his glasses were in thin gold frames. It would have looked staged if it had been anyone else sitting so casually on the beach, but from the way he wasn't quite smiling it was evident that he'd turned his head just in time for the picture to be taken. 

As a contrast, Dirk had included a follow-up tweet with one of himself at the same age; bad hair, scowl, and a black eye from his most recent hockey game. 

"None of these comments are flattering in the least," Jake pointed out as he scrolled down through Dirk's notifications. 

"Sure they are," Dirk said. He leant closer to read over Jake's shoulder. "That one not so much, sure. Block that guy, would you? Thanks. The point is that they all pretty much agree with my initial assessment on the topic. Block that one too, that's fucking nasty. Do you want me to take it down?" 

"No," Jake sighed. "Then it'll just be blatantly obvious that I requested for you to do just that. Leave it up, they'll all forget about this in a day or two anyway. Oh, you've got a notification."

"Who's it from?"

+++

"Holy shit, check this out," Dave said, thrusting his phone into John's line of sight. He waved it around when John didn't look, trying to draw his attention away from the parking lot. Eventually, John glanced over and gave a vague 'uh huh'. "Did you even look?"

"Dude, I'm trying to park."

"So?"

"So I'm not a terrible driver like you are and sometimes I like to look at the mirrors when I'm trying to park," John said, glancing over his shoulder as he backed the sedan into an empty space. As soon as he slipped the car into park and lifted the handbrake, Dave shoved the phone in his face again. 

"Dude, we both know I could get us back home in half the time it took you to get us here," Dave said. "Check it out," he added again, passing his phone to John so he could get out of the car. 

"Who the hell is that?"

"Jake, the step-dad via Bro. Apparently England has just been all old family photos all the time so far," Dave explained, taking his phone back once he walked around the hood of the car. "Here, Bro in the same year," he said, turning the phone around again. 

"He looks like you," John said, tilting the phone over so he could see the screen properly. "He's got the stupid glasses and everything."

"Yeah, I know," Dave laughed. "Mine look totally rad in comparison though, right?"

Dirk's tweet said he was seventeen in the photo. He was in a dorm room though, with a perfectly organised desk and shelves covered in Engineering textbooks behind him. It had to have been taken during his first semester of college, Dave realised. He was only weeks, probably a month at the most, older than Dirk was in the photo. 

It was a strange thing to realise, but an even stranger thing that he was caught off-guard by it.

He couldn't remember a Christmas without Dirk. 

It was Christmas Eve and he was in Washington with an entirely new family. Dirk wasn't even in the country; he never left the country. It was Christmas and he was suddenly standing dead still in the middle of a Target parking lot because at eighteen years old, he was spending his first Christmas without Dirk. 

"Dave?"

"Huh? Yeah, dude, hang on. I'm trying to think of a reply to that tweet," Dave said, looking up when John bumped his shoulder. "It's gotta be good, y'know?"

"Yeah, if you're gonna try and show up your dad, you want to do it properly," John said with a grin. He turned and took a few backwards steps, trying to get Dave to follow him into the store. 

"Did you just sass me, John? Really?"

"Yeah. What are you going to do, tell your mom?"

"Oh my God. No wonder she never let us meet you before, you're an asshole," Dave joked.

"Yeah, but she thinks you're the asshole and I'm the not-asshole," John said. He took another few steps back without really bothering to see how close he was to the end of the aisle. 

"Okay, okay, I'm coming. Calm your shit, John, it's just Target." 

"So what did you say?" John asked, turning back around as Dave finally caught up. 

"That I'm way hotter now than he was back then."

"Ew?"

"Look, kind of ew, sure. But he'll take it personally and that's going to be hilarious," Dave explained. He slipped his cell into his pocket and grabbed John's arm before he could walk in front of an oncoming minivan. "Dude, parking lot."

"Whatever. Oh man, did you message me as well? Because I totally already know that you think you're the hottest thing ever."

"What do you mean by 'I think'?"

"Dude, whatever. We need to get chips and more soda," John said, quickly glancing at his phone while consulting the list that Roxy had scribbled on his arm before they'd left the house. "And your dignity."

"What?"

"It's on the list, Dave. Roxy was adamant that we stick to the list." 

"Man, I'm just getting shit on by everyone today. So what was with your phone going off?" Dave asked. He picked up a shopping basket as they walked through the main entrance of the store. 

"Nothing important."

"So it was Vriska."

"No! If by no, I mean yeah. Yeah, it was," John admitted. "She's bored."

"Tell her to just stop being bored."

"I did, and I put in a smiley and everything but then she said your mom is a bitch."

"Oh, hell fucking no she fucking didn't," Dave said, whipping his own phone out of his pocket again to scan for messages of his own. 

"Yeah. I think she's just mad though? Like, still mad about how Dad and Roxy made her sleep downstairs last night," John explained. He took the shopping basket from Dave when he held it out and looped the handle over his own arm. 

"Still?"

"Yeah. What are you doing?" John asked, watching as Dave punched out a message with what looked like enough force to crack his screen. "Please don't start a fight with Vriska!"

"If I wanted to start a fight with Vriska, I'd venture into your pocket, take the keys, drive back, and punch Vriska in the face," Dave said. He let his expression slip back into neutral and put his phone away once he finished sending his text. 

"You'd go through my pockets while I'm wearing them? Gross, dude!" John exclaimed, swinging the basket to deliberately hit the back of Dave's knee with one of the sharp plastic corners.

"I go through Karkat's pockets all the time," Dave shrugged. "He keeps a lot of weird shit on his person at all times. It's like a fucked up lucky dip. Gum? Cash? Candy wrappers? Who knows."

"You know that's weird, right? Like, you know it's weird." 

"You'd know weird, you have to look at that face every morning." 

"So do you, this week." 

"Jesus shit, Egbert, you're some kind of fucking sass machine today."

"Sorry?" John said, in a way that made it obvious he wasn't planning on apologising for anything. Dave let it slide and just kicked up one foot to try and buckle John's knee in retaliation. "Can we not talk about Vriska anymore today?"

"Why'd you invite her over?" Dave asked. "Like, last question then we'll go back to talking about whatever the fuck else but seriously, dude, you invited her round to your place knowing she'd pull this shit. It's what she does. She's got this particular kind of bullshit that we've all been familiar with for years and now you're subjected to it, in person, almost every day of the goddamn week. You get the chance to go a few weeks without really seeing her, then just invite her over for Christmas?"

"It's not like that," John said, as he picked out a few bags of chips and tossed them into the basket. "I mean, I guess it kind of is but it's more complicated than that. She's smart, and funny, and she's actually a massive nerd and I like all of those things. And I can totally get why she's kind of mean sometimes, because her family is pretty awful? Like her sister is totally smarter than her and likes to rub it in her face, and she talks almost non-stop and it's always about her? And I guess her mom is pretty bad too but she won't tell me much about her."

"So basically you pulled your nicest-guy-in-the-world schtick and invited her to your place so she didn't have to go back to that," Dave pointed out. He swapped out one of the bags of plain chips for a second salt and vinegar. "You know you're leading her on, right? Like, in a big way." 

"Okay, but I'm not?"

"Okay, but you are?"

"I'm not!"

"John, dude. You are. You gotta tell her." 

"Okay, but do you want Crush or Sierra Mist?"

"Sierra, but I think you're missing the point," Dave said, reaching for a box of cans. "You're being nice, she likes you because you're nice, and as long as you're being nice she's gonna be convinced you're in on the whole thing when you're not." 

"Okay, can we really not talk about it anymore? Because you're kind of not saying things I don't already know and it's getting annoying," John said, picking up a carton of coke cans in his free hand.

"Dude, we're like official actual brothers now, it's kind of my job to be annoying and shit. I've had like fifteen years of practice to get really good at the whole 'being the little brother' thing. I don't even have to try anymore, just ask Rose. It's like some kind of ninja reflex." 

"Dude," John whined.

"Don't even, man, or I'll just tell mom you pummelled me and get a whole slew of family baby super sympathy," Dave said. He shifted his grip on the carton and took out his phone again, to read the text that had come through on their walk back towards the registers. "Oh, fuck."

"What?" John asked, trying to read the screen before Dave had the chance to tilt it over. "Oh, _fuck_!"

TT: Our mother seems to be having a delightful one-on-one conversation with Vriska fucking Serket.

**End of Act 5.1**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you all for reading and sticking with me on this one! I'm so glad that Act 5 was a lot quicker to get up than Act 4 was and can still only apologise for that! 
> 
> Thank you, thank you, thank you, a million times. 
> 
> You're all wonderful! Drop by the blog for updates on the next inevitable Act. We've still got a long way to go.

**Author's Note:**

> as always, more info, updates, asks, and more can be found at twoperfectlittlefreaks.tumblr.com!
> 
> i love you.


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